Live Design: The scoop on Newsies

Extra! Extra! The new Disney musical isn't bad at all. In fact it's quite enjoyable. A surprise.

Live Design: Blood Knot and Richard III

Off Broadway this week with an Athol Fugard revival and Kevin Spacey (pictured) before the curtain rings down on the Bridge Project at BAM this Sunday.

Live Design: The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess

Ah, Audra. And two more plays on and Off Broadway. (Broadway, land of Smash, which had its moments last night, if not the most compelling first episode. I hear it improves--the American Idol beginning was amusing, the other more embedded nods to that type of performing not so much-- and with a roster of local talent to draw from how could it not?)

Live Design: Leo

A little, topsy-turvy show that I thoroughly enjoyed. And my first show of the year.

Live Design: New plays

I have been to The Mountaintop (pictured)--and a few other Broadway and Off Broadway shows besides as the year in theater ebbs. Kind of drab, I have to say, after an exciting spring; here's hoping 12 brings it up a notch.

Live Design: Man and Boy

Back to Broadway with Frank Langella, and a revival of Lemon Sky Off.

The Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark microsite

Live Design magazine is spinning a web on the web, telling the tale of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark from the design team's perspective via a specially created microsite brimming with my (ahem) "ace reportage." Take the plunge and have a look.

"Animal Magnetism"

It'll be in the August issue of Live Design but you can read the first part of my article on the award-winning design of War Horse online.

Live Design: End of 10

The 2009-2010 Broadway season, that is, with six new shows, in ascending order of quality. (Pictured is The Normal Heart). The 2010-2011 seaon begins June 14 with the opening, at last, of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which I see on Friday.

In other news I saw myself, sevreral times, at the Drama Desk Awards, which Ovation is televising in highly truncated but enjoyable form. Best times to watch for me: at the 46-minute mark, during the Newsical number about an hour in, and at the end under host Harvey Fierstein's credit. Closest I'll get to being a star.

Live Design: The "It's Showtime!" edition

"Six shows running at once!"--Max Bialystock, The Producers. Including the four-star, four-letter-word filled smash The Book of Mormon, pictured.

Live Design: All aboard Priscilla

Down but not out from a bothersome sinus infection I rebound with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert as Ellen Lampert-Greaux reviews Arcadia.

Live Design: Broadway and Treasure Island

Shiver me timbers! A seaworthy play of Treasure Island here in Brooklyn, plus two new plays on Broadway. "Yo ho ho back to the theater we go..."

Live Design: Other Desert Cities

Visit with Linda Lavin and the actress formerly known as Stockard Channing (all that work, sigh) today through Feb. 27 at Lincoln Center.

Live Design: The year ends

Not with a bang, but with a couple of whimpers, only one truly rewarding. Pictured are Jeffrey Wright and Mos in John Guare's A Free Man of Color.

Live Design: Play dates

More shows this week, but you'll have to act fast to see the flop Elling and the festival attraction Lingua Franca, which close today. Elf (pictured) hangs around through Jan. 2.

Live Design: Season rundown

Current Broadway and Off Broadway shows in review this week include the musical of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Michael Shannon and his finned friend in the comedy Mistakes Were Made.

Live Design: The Merchant of Venice

Al Pacino seeks his pound of flesh in Shakespeare's confounding comedy, running in repertory with The Winter's Tale through Aug. 1 at the Delacorte.

Broadway: The 2009-2010 season ends

Sondheim on Sondheim looms large over a rundown on seven shows that concluded the theater year, including The Addams Family, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in Fences, and Green Day onstage in American Idiot.

Shows: Frank, Tony, and the Boys

Come Fly Away with Sinatra, Lend Me a Tenor, and The Scottsboro Boys as I pick it up again after spring break. Tenor stars Justin Bartha and Tony Shalhoub approximate how I feel to be back after a week on the Florida coast.

Plays: I'm Walken here

The ghoulish comedian (which is pretty much what he is these days) returns to Broadway in Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane, while other good ensemble casts lose their cool in the drama When the Rain Stops Falling and The Pride. (Praise, too, for the New Group revival of Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, which closed on Saturday. Shepard himself found the piece "rickety" but its fine cast, ably directed by Ethan Hawke, found some life in it. Interestingly, for a piece that deals with some painful themes, there was no "adult language" in it at all. The absence of profanity is more startling than its presence.)