KIMBERLY FAITH HICKMAN

ANDREW GANS, Playbill.com Two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster and stage and screen actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson announced the nominees for the 2013 Tony Awards April 30 at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at Lincoln Center. The Tony Awards will be broadcast in a live three-hour ceremony from Radio City Music Hall, on the CBS television network, June 9. Nominations follow: Best Play The Assembled Parties Author: Richard Greenberg Lucky Guy Author: Nora Ephron The Testament of Mary Author: Colm Toíbín Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike Author: Christopher Durang Best Musical Bring It On: The Musical A Christmas Story, The Musical Kinky Boot

BY DAVID ROONEY, The Hollywood Reporter Early in The Assembled Parties, a visitor swoons over the elegant 14-room Central Park West apartment of his hosts. “It’s like the sets of those plays you love,” he tells his mother on the phone. “With the 'breezy dialogue.' They sort of talk that way and everybody’s unbelievably nice and, like, gracious and happy. It’s like you go to New York and you look for New York, but it isn’t there? But it’s here.” Winking nods such as this one are sprinkled throughoutRichard Greenberg’s lovely play, which is as knowingly self-aware of being a Broadway representation of New York as a vintage Woody Allen film is in the way it portrays the city onscreen. Almost ev

JESSE GREEN, Vulture Though theater owners love the bar receipts, intermission can be a terrible thing. Not just because of the bathroom lines and overloud kibitzers. Playwrights themselves seem to have turned against the traditional mid-play break, which cruelly interrupts the organic flow of stories designed, more and more, to take place in real time. But rarely has there been an intermission so cruel as the one between the acts of The Assembled Parties, Richard Greenberg’s excellent new play at the Manhattan Theater Club. During those fifteen minutes, twenty years pass, and the altered reality on which the curtain rises when the audience has resettled may hit you like a punch to the heart

BY ADAM FELDMAN, Time Out New York Richard Greenberg’s elegantly moving The Assembled Parties is somewhere between a slice of life and a slice of mille-feuille. Unfolding in a palatial Upper West Side flat, first in 1980 and later in 2000, the play is a Jewish family drama by way of The New York Review of Books. Characters in Greenberg’s word-besotted world mix Yiddishisms with terms like aleatory, ambrosial and artesian—just to skim the A-list—and drop names like Louis Auchincloss and Mary Wollstonecraft. (A ruby-red necklace is described as a “rutilated, asterized treasure.”) The theatrical nature of this style is more or less explicit: “You would love the apartment, Mom,” says a young vis

BEN BRANTLEY, The New York Times There are tales, still told by the old ones of Broadway, of a time when Charm — with a capital C — was a cardinal virtue in the theater. It was an attribute that made plain actresses beautiful, and turned short, stocky men into matinee idols. Entire plays, it is said, were written in celebration of those who possessed this enviable trait, works filled with airy, tickling dialogue and the accouterments of tasteful wealth. To my great surprise, a brand-new version of such a play has materialized at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, and it is, in a word, charming. It is also smart, sad and so impossibly well-spoken you may feel like giving up on conversation. It i

ELYSA GARDNER, USA Today NEW YORK -- In Act One of The Assembled Parties, we're introduced to a Manhattan family with, it seems, much to be grateful for. Ben, a successful, middle-aged lawyer, lives with his elegant wife, Julie, and their 4-year-old son, Timmy, in a 14-room apartment on Central Park West. An older son, Scotty, has just graduated from a prestigious university. Their blessings are reinforced as they are joined, on Christmas Day in 1980, by Ben's sister, Faye, along with her less prosperous husband and mousy daughter; and by Scotty's college buddy, Jeff, who while equally bright and apparently more focused appears to lack his friend's confidence and poise. But appearances can b

TANNER STRANSKY, Entertainment Weekly Richard Greenberg delighted and surprised Broadway in 2003 with his Tony-winning Take Me Out, an edgy play plotted around a Major League baseball player coming out of the closet. The playwright's latest effort, the Manhattan Theatre Club's The Assembled Parties, doesn't quite rock the genre in the same way — it's a talk-heavy New York City drama concerning the power of familial bonds. But Parties feels at home on Broadway, gets a lot of laughs (as well as some tears), and it's as close to bullet-proof as they come on the Great White Way these days. (It's also a vastly more successful play than Greenberg's recent adaptation ofBreakfast at Tiffany's.) Part

LINDA WINER, Newsday There was a time when every season had a play or even two by Richard Greenberg -- who won his 2003 Tony for "Take Me Out" and unfair notoriety when Julia Roberts made her 2006 Broadway debut in "Three Days of Rain." Through the '90s and half of this century's first decade, we had so much of Greenberg's fast-talking, exquisitely eloquent New Yorkers and intelligent, chameleonic stories that the word "prolific," when attached to his name, began to sound more like a complaint than praise. Forgive the ingratitude, please. "The Assembled Parties," his first new play here since 2006, has been lovingly directed by Lynne Meadow and cast with such experts of emotional nuance as J

Associated Press NEW YORK — The intermission at “The Assembled Parties” takes 20 years. No, really: The first act begins and ends in a Manhattan apartment on Christmas Day in 1980, and the second opens in the same place on Christmas Day in 2000. It is the best time travel right now on Broadway. The latest work by playwright Richard Greenberg is a beautiful and touching look at the inner workings of a well-to-do family, their mistakes and the stories that bind them. The two-decade shift reveals that the things that bother us now intensely — that boil our blood or worry us — are often not the things we care about later. And that people we thought we knew are very different. Love and compassion

OBERT FELDBERG, North Jersey.com Over nearly 30 years, Richard Greenberg has written two dozen plays about various aspects of American life, including the Tony-winning "Take Me Out." None, though — at least of the 12 or 13 I've seen — approaches his splendid achievement with "The Assembled Parties." The play, which opened Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is very, very funny, and, as it ends, deeply moving. What's most impressive, though, is Greenberg's command of his craft in weaving an ambitious, intricately connected tapestry of family relationships: husbands and wives, brother and sister, and, most profoundly, parents and children. The story takes place on two Christmas