Bryony Renner

I hate musicals. And I will continue to feel contempt for the genre until the audience stops clapping after every damned song. It's an infuriating habit. It means that most of us consider a musical a mere collection of tunes--at best, a happy diversion, a pleasant spectacle. We don't expect...

A friend of mine once made the mistake of performing a scene from a Neil Simon play in an acting class. "Stop!" the teacher cried, clutching his head. His objection was not to the acting (although hindsight says it was probably bad). Rather, the teacher complained, Simon's plays lacked character...