Monday, November 28, 2016
“You are no Larry Kramer,” the Academic shouts at his boyfriend, the Writer, a hothead on a tear about homophobic violence. “This isn’t Boys in the Band,” the Writer later sn…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:43PMMonday, November 21, 2016
When asked in a recent interview what inspired him to write This Day Forward, the playwright Nicky Silver immediately answered, “other writers’ successes.” If only any line of the play…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMI met Andy at a party in 1995. Soon afterward, he phoned the host, a mutual friend, to get my number so he could invite me to a play. As it happened, the mutual friend, hearing the descripti…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:18PMSunday, November 20, 2016
Probably the strangest and least revivable Broadway genre is the midcentury hooker musical comedy. Shows like Irma La Douce (first produced in 1956), New Girl in Town (1957), and House of Fl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:00PMThursday, November 17, 2016
Though he has no prior professional theater credits, Jason Sudeikis holds the stage with confidence and verve as the inspiring prep school teacher John Keating in the adaptation of Dead Poet…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:15PMTuesday, November 15, 2016
Sometimes, with a good-enough playwright, it’s good to have no idea what’s going on. That was the case for me with Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entir…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, November 14, 2016
How can it be that a show based on the most serious novel of all time is both the most gorgeous new musical in town and, for much of its length, the silliest? That may be a self-answering qu…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMWednesday, November 9, 2016
After the opening-night audience at Women of a Certain Age gave the cast a well-deserved standing ovation and started to file out of the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall, ushers could be hea…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:47PMMonday, November 7, 2016
Hally is a whiny, pretentious, self-involved, 17-year-old nerd. Sam and Willie are dignified workingmen in their mid-40s. Nevertheless, Hally is “Master Harold” and Sam and Willie are th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, November 3, 2016
Lynn Nottage’s gripping but disappointing new play Sweat, which opens tonight at the Public, arrives in New York from its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival trailing hosanna…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, November 2, 2016
“I always talk in stories; they really illustrate points,” says Michael Tubbs, a councilman running for mayor of Stockton, California. Actually, it’s Anna Deavere Smith who speaks thes…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:16PMSunday, October 30, 2016
Classically trained actors are naturally drawn to roles that show off their verbal fluency, but few contemporary plays give them the chance. No wonder Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Da…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:05PMThursday, October 27, 2016
The heartbreaking revival of the William Finn–James Lapine musical Falsettos that opens tonight on Broadway comes, by chance, just a day after scientists reported in Nature that the longst…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, October 20, 2016
Trying to avoid the third presidential debate, I decided to watch a press screener of Fox TV’s version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show last night, thinking camp would be the perfect antid…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:53PMTuesday, October 18, 2016
It’s probably not a coincidence that three of today’s best multi-character monologists — to coin a paradoxical job title — are women of color: Anna Deavere Smith, Nilaja Sun, and Sar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, October 16, 2016
Part of what keeps great plays great, age after age, is that they have so much in them: so much psychology, amusement, conflict, philosophy, politics, emotion, and linguistic pleasure. What …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:41PMThursday, October 13, 2016
Perhaps it’s the uncertainty principle at work, but one of last year’s best dramas has somehow become one of this year’s best comedies. I’m referring to Manhattan Theatre Club’s pr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, October 10, 2016
When Broadway isn’t busy being a temple of high art, it’s more of a transient hotel, with the oddest characters showing up for short stays. The Lyceum seems to attract a lot of these mar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMThursday, October 6, 2016
In 1914, Irving Berlin, already world-famous for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” became a charter member of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Arrangers and Publishers. Until then, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMSaturday, October 1, 2016
In early 1987, the director Peter Brook and the BAM impresario Harvey Lichtenstein climbed a ladder and popped through a window of the derelict Majestic Theater on Fulton Street in Fort Gree…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:46PMThursday, September 29, 2016
In 1969, a National Geographic photographer named Loren McIntyre made what was supposed to be a three-day expedition to Brazil’s Javari Valley in search of the Mayouruna, an indigenous, it…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, September 28, 2016
Judith Light can do no wrong onstage, which isn’t to say she can save a play that gets so little right. Without her, All the Ways to Say I Love You, the hour-long monologue that opened MCC…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:30PMMonday, September 26, 2016
Narratives don’t get much more contested than that of Nat Turner, the leader of the infamous slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. To begin with, our knowledge of the even…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, September 22, 2016
Like “humanistic Judaism,” the term “investigative theater” proposes an invidious distinction. All theater investigates. What the Civilians do under that rubric is merely more litera…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:38PMMonday, September 19, 2016
Even from the beginning, Edward Albee was rarely photographed smiling — or, rather, photo editors seldom chose to print any smiling portraits that might have been taken. The truth was that…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:39AMSaturday, September 17, 2016
Richard Nelson’s Gabriel family plays, like the Apple family plays before them, are studded with topical political references; Nelson sets each installment on the day of its opening and ad…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:48PMFriday, September 16, 2016
When Taylor Mac first emerges through the power-chord fog of a 24-piece orchestra at St. Ann’s Warehouse, he is dressed in an outfit that looks as if Marie Antoinette, having survived an e…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:52PMWednesday, September 14, 2016
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973) was a gospel singer, pianist, and guitarist whose combination of holy rolling and louche swing made her one of the forgotten godparents of rock. (“Siste…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMNear the end of the three-and-a-half-hour slog that is Phaedra(s) — just when you’ve given up hope for it and, indeed, all existence — something wonderful happens. Until then, the prod…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:56PMTuesday, September 13, 2016
A sensational concert performance of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years at Town Hall last night, starring Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry, started the New York fall theater season off…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:13PMMonday, September 12, 2016
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973) was a gospel singer, pianist, and guitarist whose combination of holy rolling and louche swing made her one of the forgotten godparents of rock. (“Siste…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM 
