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Peter Morgan’s new play Patriots, now on Broadway, opens with an awareness of its audience. “In the West you have no idea,” Boris Berezovksy (an excellent Michael Stuhlbarg) says through a voiceover. “You think of Russia as a cold, bleak place, full of hardship and cruelty.” The stage is bare, and the oligarch, who played an instrumental role in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, speaks to us from a liminal space. He goes on to describe the beauty of his country, Russian music, the sounds of children laughing in the streets and the taste of ice cream on a cold day.

When the stage comes into view (set design by Miriam Buether, lighting design by Jack Knowles), it’s 1955. Berezovsky is a schoolboy gifted in mathematics. A teacher urges his parents — congenial and full of quips — to push their son. “Anyone can be a doctor, Mrs. Berezovsky,” says...

Netflix is about to make its Broadway producing debut, joining the team of Peter Morgan’s upcoming play Patriots.

The play from the creator of the Netflix signature series The Crown arrives on Broadway April 1 for a 12-week engagement following a record-breaking run at London’s Almeida Theatre and a sold-out 12-week West End transfer at the Noël Coward Theatre. Opening night at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre is April 22.

The play is set in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union and chronicles the rise of oligarchs like billionaire Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a little-known deputy mayor of St. Petersburg named Vladimir Putin (Will Keen). When an eventual successor to President Boris Yeltsin is needed, Berezovsky turns to Putin, whose ruthless rise threatens Berezovsky’s reign and sets off a confrontation between the two powerful, fatally flawed men.

Netflix’s participation was announced in a press release today...

While the Drama Desk Awards nominate a slew of off-Broadway fare, the winners invariably come from Broadway. That was once again the case on Sunday when all but one of the 16 champs in the musical races were Broadway productions while it was 8 of 12 on the play side.

This love of all things Broadway even extended to “Hadestown,” which was only in contention for new elements such as cast members after having contended here previously for it Off-Broadway run. It won four awards: Director (Rachel Chavkin), Featured Actor in a Musical (Andre De Shields), Lighting Design, and Sound Design.

One of its main rivals for Best Musical at the Tony Awards is “Tootsie,” which claimed victories for Best Actor (Santino Fontana), Book, Music, and Lyrics. But it was another contender, “The Prom,” that swooped in and claimed Best Musical despite losing all of its other bids.

The all Yiddish production of...

The winners for the 64th Annual Drama Desk Awards were announced Sunday night with Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman winning for Outstanding Play and The Prom taking home the trophy for Outstanding Musical.

Other big winners for the night included The Waverly Gallery and Fidder on the Roof winning for Outstanding Revival of a Play and Outstanding Revival of a Musical respectively. Dance Nation received a special Ensemble Award while Montana Levi Blanco was honored with the Sam Norkin Award.

The ceremony was hosted by Michael Urie and took place at at The Town Hall in Manhattan. The evening included performances by Drama Desk nominee George Salazar (Be More Chill) who was accompanied by composer/lyricist and Drama Desk nominee Joe Iconis. Other performers included Drama Desk nominees Stacey Sargeant and Andrew R. Butler (Rags Parkland) and Drama Desk and Tony®Award winner Lillias White who sang the In Memoriam.

The current revival of “Oklahoma!” scored the most Drama Desk love with a whopping 12 nominations. Not far behind was the stage adaptation of “Tootsie” with 11. Bu even with those tallies, Broadway shows were shut out in several top categories, including includes Lead Actor in a Play. That Tony Awards race may be stacked, but the Drama Desk nominating committee spurned big names like Bryan Cranston and Jeff Daniels and cited only Off-Broadway performances.

The vehicles for those two stars (“Network” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” respectively) similarly couldn’t crack the Best Play lineup. Despite a stellar year for new plays on Broadway, the only Tony eligible productions the Drama Desk voters invited to the party were Jez Butterworth’s Irish epic “The Ferryman” and Heidi Schreck’s acclaimed auto-drama “What the Constitution Means to Me” (which transferred from Off-Broadway within the same season).

Big names on Broadway were shut...

Daniel Fish’s wildly re-imagined revival of Oklahoma! leads New York’s Drama Desk Awards nominations with 12, including Revival of a Musical. No big surprise there — but the head-scratcher came in the Best Play category: To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the best reviewed productions of the season and a box office smash, was snubbed. See the full list below.

Unlike the Tony Awards, though, the Drama Desk Awards cover both Broadway and Off Broadway, significantly lessening the nominations’ prediction factor. Mockingbird almost certainly will be among the nominees when the Broadway-only Tony roster is announced Tuesday.

Some other notable considerations for the Desk roster is that this season’s Broadway productions of Hadestown, Torch Song and Choir Boy were ineligible from some major overall categories because each had been staged in previous seasons as Off Broadway productions. For the Broadway productions, the Drama Desk nominating committee chose to consider...

The third experimental cinematic endeavor from the writing/acting duo of Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, A Master Builder, at last reaches a notable platform of consumption with its inclusion in the Criterion collection. Their previous collaborations, My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1992), both directed by French auteur Louis Malle, have reached a sort of mythical status in the realm of art-house cinema. And so the rather hushed theatrical reception of this latest endeavor, another long-gestating exercise, this time re-working a late period play from Ibsen while Jonathan Demme usurps the directorial seat, perhaps has more to do with the fluctuating cinematic landscape. Existing, tonally, somewhere in-between the previous two ventures, this generally claustrophobic rendering doesn’t contain the same sense of innovative, inspiring energy, oscillating between moments of flaccid, rehearsed dialogue and moments of overwhelming emotional hysteria. As a filmed version of this experimental theater exercise,...

A Master Builder screens as part of the 23rd Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival on Saturday, November 22 at 2:30 Pm at Landmark’s Tivoli Theatre. Get ticket information here.

It’s the reunion over thirty years in the making. Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, the stars of Louis Malle’s 1981 cult hit My Dinner With Andre, are together again (briefly) in Jonathan Demme’s version of Henrik’s Ibsen stage classic, that’s been adapted for the screen by Shawn. Oh, and he’s the title character, celebrated architect Havald Solness, who, as the film begins, appears to be on his deathbed. He’s hooked up to machines as sister/nurses scurry about in his opulent estate. As he drifts in and out of sleep, his aging mentor Knut (Gregory) pleads with him to give his work requests to Havald’s eager young intern Ragnar (Jeff Biehl), in...

Roundabout Theatre Company Todd Haimes, Artistic Director will present Golden Globe nominee Rebecca Hall as 'Young Woman' in a new Broadway production of Machinal, by Sophie Treadwell, directed by Lyndsey Turner. The cast will include Suzanne Bertish as 'Mother', Michael Cumpsty as 'Husband',Morgan Spector as 'Lover' and Damian Baldet, Ashley Bell, Jeff Biehl, Arnie Burton, Ryan Dinning, Scott Drummond, Dion Graham, Edward James Hyland, Jason Loughlin, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Daniel Pearce, Henny Russell, Karen Walsh,Michael Warner.The cast met the press earlier today and you can check out a photo preview from the festivities below. Check back later for full coverage.

Director Jonathan Demme captures the team of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory staging a new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder.”

The dynamic duo behind My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street take on another classic of the stage in their big-screen Henrik Ibsen adaptation, Fear of Falling.

With Jonathan Demme replacing the late Louis Malle at the helm, this terrifically performed version of The Master Builder -- based on a screenplay by Wallace Shawn, from his own translation of the Norwegian text -- channels the rage, joy and delusions of an aging architect’s final days, where a ghost from his past (played by the exuberant Lisa Joyce) guides him to the great beyond. Premiering in the Rome Film Festival’s experimental CinemaXXI section, this dense and occasionally poetic chamber piece should appeal to very upscale audiences both at fests and -- despite production values...