Monday, December 14, 2020
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
The playwright Sam Shepard’s matter-of-fact observations about where his characters stand in the world tell us so much about the world they inhabit, Hilton Als writes.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 09:06AMMonday, May 6, 2019
Hilton Als reviews the new musicals “Beetlejuice” and “Tootsie,” which feature performers who help you see the narrative behind all the flash.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:46PMMonday, April 29, 2019
Hilton Als reviews a newsroom drama about Rupert Murdoch and Taylor Mac’s spin on Shakespeare’s first tragedy.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMMonday, April 8, 2019
In a new staging, the director uses Shakespeare’s words as a launching pad from which to explore his own theatrical concerns, Hilton Als writes.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMMonday, March 25, 2019
Hilton Als reviews Suzan-Lori Parks’s new work, “White Noise,” which enters a terrible emotional landscape but doesn’t explore it.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMMonday, March 18, 2019
Hilton Als reviews the new musicals “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Be More Chill,” which explore their protagonists’ longing and belonging.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMMonday, July 30, 2018
Young Jean Lee’s first Broadway play not only lacks the humor, recklessness, and passion of her earlier works; it refutes those things, writes Hilton Als.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMMonday, April 23, 2018
Hilton Als looks at class, colonialism, and self-creation in Bartlett Sher’s production of “My Fair Lady,” starring Lauren Ambrose and Harry Hadden-Paton.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:33AMMonday, April 16, 2018
The new staging of the musical is an intimate extravaganza, packed with ideas about the body, gender roles, and fear of closeness.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMMonday, March 5, 2018
Monday, February 19, 2018
Hilton Als writes that in the playwright’s latest work, his slick cynicism threatens to overtake his real gifts.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMFriday, January 5, 2018
The director and playwright is back, with “Paradiso,” a work that explores his interest in myth and the mundane.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 04:00AMMonday, November 27, 2017
Jocelyn Bioh’s play comments on our fascinating era, in which so much debate centers on the female body.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMMonday, October 23, 2017
As the rock icon sang, it became clear that the show allowed him to understand not only himself but what goes into the making of a self.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMMonday, April 24, 2017
Bette Midler is such an incredible self-creation—an artist like no other—that finding roles that can harness her enormous energy while allowing room for her wit and her extraordinary ski…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00AMThursday, March 16, 2017
Arthur Miller’s “The Price” (in revival at the American Airlines, under the direction of Terry Kinney) premièred on Broadway in 1968, four years after Miller’s other mid-career play…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:00PMThursday, January 12, 2017
When “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” opened on Broadway, in 1968, it featured one of the best young casts ever to appear in an American musical. Diane Keaton, Melba Moore, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:00PMSunday, December 11, 2016
When Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart put together the musical “Lady in the Dark,” in 1940, Freud was big. The great man’s thinking had yet to come under wide attack, and psycho…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:00PMThursday, November 24, 2016
Throughout his career, James Baldwin had a hankering to work in show business. Like Henry James, one of his early heroes, Baldwin loved the footlights; early on, with his friend and editor S…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:00PMSaturday, September 17, 2016
Writing that gets under your skin, in your bones, will play in your head and memory like nothing else. While painting, photography, and movies can come at you with a very particular force—…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:44PMFriday, May 27, 2016
While it’s always a treat to see amazing ensembles working together as they tear a play apart, the better to expose its meaning, it’s thrilling in a different way to watch performers who…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:55AMMonday, May 2, 2016
Here we go again, back to that terrible summer house in New England, which is yet another depressed character in Eugene O’Neill’s unsurpassable “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (now…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 10:27AMFriday, April 15, 2016
In 1962, Lillian and Helen Ross published “The Player,” a wonderful collection of interviews with actors, ranging from Maureen Stapleton to Sidney Poitier, many of which originated in th…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:56PMMonday, March 14, 2016
I have so many complicated responses to David Harrower’s 2005 play, “Blackbird” (at the Belasco), that trying to separate what I feel about the subject tangentially and what Harrower a…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 09:27PMSunday, March 13, 2016
All this talk about diversity—in newspapers, on college campuses, at the Oscars—can be hard on a liberal white guy. How’s a sensitive Caucasian man—no Trumpite—supposed to deal wit…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:21PMDirectors who have an interest in style are not prevalent in the American theatre. Mostly, directors are there to serve the play and keep the bodies moving in space as clearly, effectively, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:21PMI’m always somewhat surprised to discover how many of the writers and thinkers I’ve admired over the years grew up reading Eugene O’Neill with a passion equal to my own. For years, I t…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:21PMSaturday, February 13, 2016
It was always exciting to see, around town, those lovely posters by Paul Davis announcing a new production at the Public Theatre—“our” theatre, over on Lafayette Street, a place that p…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:43AMFriday, January 22, 2016
In 2007, the theatre artists and activists Katie Cappiello and Meg McInerney founded the Arts Effect All-Girl Theatre Company. There, the directors provided a forum for teen-age girls, where…
SOURCE: www.newyorker.com?p%3D3158082?mbid%3Drss at 12:35PMMonday, December 28, 2015
Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on famil…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:24AM 
