Joyfully Celebrating 13 Years of B&Me

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Time flies. And this year it’s whizzing by so quickly that I almost forgot to take some time out to celebrate the 13th anniversary of Broadway & Me. But although I’m a week or so late, I'm no less exuberant about having survived, and even thrived, for this long.

Thirteen, my birth date, has always been a lucky number for me and this past year has been filled with all kinds of happy-making events. At the top of the list, of course, was seeing lots of shows and discovering some fine new playwrights, several of whom were kind enough to talk with me about their plays for the “Stagecraft” podcast I continue to do for BroadwayRadio (you can check out those interviews by clicking here).

I also got to talk to other theater makers for stories I wrote for other theater-related sites from a Q&A with playwright Jeremy O. Harris and director Robert O’Hara for their much-talked about production of Slave Play (click here to read that) to a profile of the young actor Will Hochman who made his Broadway debut opposite Mary-Louise Parker in Adam Rapp’s wonderful The Sound Inside (you can read it by clicking here). 

Another highlight of the year was accepting an Emmy on behalf of an episode I co-hosted for the still-much missed TV show "Theater Talk," created and produced by my pal Susan Haskins-Doloff. A few weeks later, I joined Susan and a panel of other theater critics to talk about the season for a reunion episode of "Theater Talk" that was filmed at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and later broadcast on stations across the country (we’re scheduled to get together again this May 5, so I hope you’ll keep an eye out for that.)

And just a month ago, I produced a panel for this year’s BroadwayCon to kick off the 70th anniversary celebration of the Outer Critics Circle. The panel was moderated by my fellow OCC board member Broadway World’s Richard Ridge and featured a super talented panel of playwrights that included Ming Peiffer (Usual Girls) Donja R. Love (Sugar in Our Wounds, One in Two) and Bess Wohl (Small Mouth Sounds, Grand Horizons).

As I said, really happy-making stuff. But it all began here, when I published my first blog post on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2007. And writing here and sharing theater with you all remains the thing closest to my heart.

I am endlessly grateful to those of you who have stuck with me over the years —and to those of you who may have just stumbled onto this post for the first time today. The 2020 spring season is heating up so I’m already looking forward to another terrific year of theatergoing and I hope you’ll share it with me.