There was a time in the American theater when ordinary people could collect quarters in a cup and, after some weeks, buy a ticket for a Broadway show. It was the decade after World War II, the cataclysm that put horror and hope on a seemingly equal footing. But American idealism had triumphed, or so

“El Niño,” the winter child that blows up a storm, is also the name of an oratorio by the modern composer John Adams. It celebrates the coming of the miraculous child, Jesus, as recorded in the Nativity scenes and as interpreted expansively between the scenes, often with Latin Ame

In several serious dramas on Broadway this summer, the good (or bad) angel of uncertainty bedeviled many a leading man. Ambiguity and ambivalence plagued them in at least four plays. From Arthur Miller’s updated salesman in The Ride Down Mount Morgan to Tom Stoppard’s fortyish playwright