All stories by Hilton Als on BroadwayStars

Monday, April 1, 2013

Hilton Als: “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” at the Tribeca Film Festival. by Hilton Als

Elaine Stritch has a new documentary coming out, “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” which will première at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19. That’s the happy news. What …

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Monday, March 25, 2013

Hilton Als: Richard Greenberg’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” by Hilton Als

Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is so extraordinary a work that it incites not writerly envy but pride. Published in 1958, it’s one of those pop master…

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Hilton Als: Guillermo Calderon’s “Neva,” at the Public. by Hilton Als

At the end of Guillermo Calderón’s strange, new, and vital “Neva” (at the Public, through March 31), the forty-two-year-old author and director—who grew up in Ch…

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Monday, March 4, 2013

Hilton Als: The prima presence of Broadway press agent Irene Gandy. by Hilton Als

In the theatre, for the most part, glamour belongs to those actors and performers who wear it like a second skin—a mystery you don’t want to unbutton, let alone analyze. But the …

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM
Monday, February 25, 2013

Hilton Als: Sarah Paulson in “Talley’s Folly.” by Hilton Als

If you listen to an actor’s voice carefully, you can tell something about her range. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sarah Paulson, when performing onstage, indulge in what I …

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM
Thursday, February 21, 2013

The Theatre: “Really Really” by Hilton Als

Grace (Lauren Culpepper) and Leigh (Zosia Mamet) are roommates. They enter their darkened apartment, laughing. They’re both in their early twenties, miniskirted, and high from a night …

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:12PM
Monday, February 18, 2013

Hilton Als: Joe Allen’s eightieth birthday. by Hilton Als

I’m not particularly comfortable around theatre people. The big gestures around little intimacies—“I saw you on the aisle at ‘Glengarry’; could you believe Al?!…

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Hilton Als: “Luck of the Irish” review. by Hilton Als

The Lady in Orange said it first: “ever since i realized there was someone callt / a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag / i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness / …

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Thursday, February 7, 2013

The Theatre: “Good Person of Szechwan” by Hilton Als

The big, enveloping spirit that emanates from the utterly outstanding revival of Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Szechwan” (at La Mama) is part of the show’s essenti…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:54PM
Monday, January 21, 2013

Hilton Als: Nalaga’at, at Skirball Center. by Hilton Als

Ever since “Sleep No More” proved that audiences don’t necessarily want to just sit and watch actors go about a playwright’s business framed by a proscenium, immersiv…

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Monday, January 14, 2013

Hilton Als: William Inge’s “Picnic” review. by Hilton Als

I grew up in the city. And the books and movies and plays that I loved as a boy were the ones whose sense of rural quietude was able to shut out the din of urban life. In my countryside-dott…

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Hilton Als: Tina Satter’s “Seagull (Thinking of You),” at the “COIL” festival. by Hilton Als

It’s odd, but when I first saw Tina Satter’s name, I assumed it was a typo—shouldn’t Satter be Slattery? My optical illusion in search of a more familiar name says mo…

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Saturday, January 12, 2013

The Theatre: Under the Radar by Hilton Als

“Under the Radar” presents theatre artists ranging from Australia’s Back to Back Theatre to the performance artist Taylor Mac, as well as a temporary home to try out new id…

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Monday, December 31, 2012

My Year in Theatre by Hilton Als

Newly diverse audiences, and the New York and Chicago theatre’s energized and energizing approach to making a new, evolving, vital art form in particular, can make going to the theatre…

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Hilton Als: Mimi Lien’s set for “Zero Cost House,” at Pig Iron. by Hilton Als

It’s curious that set designers are often the unsung heroes of a production, given that they usually provide the most concrete and evocative elements of a show. For those artists who d…

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Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Theatre: Amy Herzog’s “The Great God Pan” by Hilton Als

There’s no real reason to think about “The Great God Pan” (at Playwright’s Horizons) after you’ve seen it, and I think that’s fair since Amy Herzog, the p…

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Monday, November 5, 2012

Hilton Als: “The Heiress” review. by Hilton Als

In a way, the ideal cast for “The Heiress,” the 1947 play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz (now in revival at the Walter Kerr), would have been Henry Fonda and his daughter, Jane. As t…

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Monday, October 22, 2012

Hilton Als: Reviews of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Barbra Streisand Live. by Hilton Als

You know how it is: you want to scream, and then you don’t scream, as your spouse—or whoever—asks, for the umpteenth time, Where did you put this or that, did you feed the …

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Monday, October 15, 2012

Hilton Als: Austin Pendleton’s new production of “Ivanov.” by Hilton Als

Is Austin Pendleton the hardest-working man in show business? From 2004 to 2012, he directed ten works for the stage, wrote four plays, taught at the H.B. Studio and the New School, and was …

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Hilton Als: “Cyrano de Bergerac,” “Harper Regan,” “Him,” and “Heresy” reviews. by Hilton Als

Seventeenth-century Paris. A tennis court at the Hotel de Bourgogne, where a different kind of sport is going on: the tennis court has been converted into a theatre, and, before the play its…

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Monday, October 1, 2012

Hilton Als: Affordable tickets at Signature Theatre and LCT3’s Claire Tow Theatre. by Hilton Als

One of the joys, for me, of spending time in Berlin was watching how involved the under-thirty set was with the city’s cultural life. Over at the Volksbühne, it was not unusual to…

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Monday, September 17, 2012

Hilton Als: “Invisible Man,” “Chaplin” reviews. by Hilton Als

I didn’t entirely understand what was bugging me about the director Christopher McElroen’s “Invisible Man” (adapted, by Oren Jacoby, from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 n…

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Monday, September 10, 2012

Hilton Als: Robert Wilson’s “Einstein On the Beach.” by Hilton Als

It was a little before midnight. A muggy night in May. The hundred-odd people gathered in the window-lined lounge of the Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel had come to see the latest wo…

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Monday, September 3, 2012

Hilton Als: Sam Shepard’s female bodies in distress. by Hilton Als

When it comes to young directors who know what to do with Sam Shepard’s chimerical, philosophically complex writing, Ethan Hawke has most of his contemporaries beat. In 2010, Hawke sta…

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Monday, August 20, 2012

Hilton Als: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods” review. by Hilton Als

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods” (at the Delacorte, in a Public Theatre production) is a disquieting show about disquiet. At first, you may be distracte…

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Monday, July 30, 2012

Hilton Als: David Greenspan as actor and playwright. by Hilton Als

In his wonderful preface to David Greenspan’s “The Myopia and Other Plays,” Marc Robinson writes that it may be perverse to approach Greenspan as a “mannerist actor a…

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Monday, July 16, 2012

Hilton Als: Reed Birney in “Uncle Vanya” at the SoHo Rep. by Hilton Als

Whenever I see Reed Birney act, I have such a feeling of discomfort that I often have to look away. His forlorn realism—he rarely plays guys who win—reminds me of those men you s…

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Monday, June 25, 2012

Hilton Als: Twiggy Pucci Garçon’s “The Reincarnation of Rockland Palace.” by Hilton Als

Near Christopher Street, in Hudson River Park, young gay and transgendered people of color sometimes hang out. There, the warm air and communal atmosphere act as a kind of shelter against be…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM
Monday, June 11, 2012

Hilton Als: Barry Paris, Rebecca Ann Rugg, and Harvey Young on American playwrights. by Hilton Als

For more than forty years, the lefty theatrical dynamo and acting teacher Stella Adler worked to bring a greater understanding of the human condition to the American stage. Her primary tools…

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Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Christina Kirk by Hilton Als

As Bev, a Chicago-based, Eisenhower-era housewife with a black maid, in Bruce Norris's two-act play "Clybourne Park," Kirk gives a performance of such slowly accumulated magnitude that the i…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:10PM
Monday, May 21, 2012

Hilton Als: “Post Plastica” at El Museo del Barrio. by Hilton Als

I’m trying to remember when I first saw the performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, but that’s like trying to remember someone’s first time making you laugh: there are no s…

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All that Chat

2023-2024 BROADWAY SEASON
May 30, 2023: Grey House - Lyceum Theatre
Jun 26, 2023: Just For Us - Hudson Theatre
Jul 24, 2023: The Cottage - Hayes Theater
Nov 16, 2023: Spamalot - St. James Theatre
Dec 18, 2023: Appropriate - Hayes Theater
Mar 07, 2024: Doubt - Todd Haimes Theatre
Apr 14, 2024: Lempicka - Longacre Theatre
Apr 17, 2024: The Wiz - Marquis Theatre
Apr 18, 2024: Suffs - Music Box Theatre
Apr 25, 2024: Mother Play - Hayes Theater
Jun 10, 2024: The Drama Desk Awards