There are few plays I disliked last year as much as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Appropriate, the story of a nasty white Arkansas family discovering in the ancestral plantation a collection of l…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:18AM[SHARE]Peggy Lee and Lena Horne lived long enough to star in their own bio-musicals; Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, and Dinah Washington became theatrical subjects only after their deaths. Either wa…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:04PM[SHARE]Seldom do costumes provide the bulk of a play's drama, but in Peter Morgan's The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, the greatest surprises and transformations are all in …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PM[SHARE]In the first episode of season five of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the character of Larry David, played by Larry David, is reduced to the cosmic indignity of buying tickets for High Holiday servic…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]A new play that reads very well on the page risks getting staged above its station. Sad to say, The Mystery of Love & Sex, by Bathsheba Doran, is that kind: engrossing in theory, a botch…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:15PM[SHARE]In a funny-awkward meeting that takes place near the beginning Verité, a pair of Norwegian publishers tells Jo Darum, our heroine, that she has a captivating authorial voice but the wro…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]I don't mean to suggest that you're unpatriotic if you aren't moved by Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's sensational new hip-hop biomusical at the Public. But in order to dislike it you'd prett…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]People who love stage musicals have learned to dread their movie adaptations; infidelity leading to disaster is pretty much in the contract. So those of us who treasure The Last Five Years, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:50PM[SHARE]Though The Iceman Cometh is generally considered one of Eugene O'Neill's greatest plays, it did not win (as four of his others did) the Pulitzer Prize; the Pulitzer is not, after all, awarde…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PM[SHARE]The Civilians call the work they do "investigative theater," which sounds very high-minded; their name, too, suggests engagement in the real life of society as opposed to the artificial life…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Sometimes " and I mean this in a good way " the Encores! series at City Center seems like the musical equivalent of A Night at the Museum, making the dinosaurs dance. That's certainly the ca…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:28PM[SHARE]A brief pause in the drumbeat of new openings left me time last week to catch up with two Off Broadway plays I'd missed earlier in January. Both had gotten mixed reviews " not just varied bu…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:04PM[SHARE]It's said that Chekhov was always trying to get the Moscow Art Theater to produce Ivan Turgenev's neglected classic A Month in the Country instead of his own new plays. Was this homage, self…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:00PM[SHARE]The frequent collaborators John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett seem to be everywhere these days, not just geographically but narratively. Whether the tale they're telling is psychological (as in…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:34PM[SHARE]By the standards of the Golden Age, when musicals with a cast of 60 and an orchestra of 40 were common, Into the Woods is not a huge show. Its 1987 Broadway premiere featured just 19 actors …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PM[SHARE]Like "humanistic Judaism," the term "imaginative theater" ought to be a redundancy. (Shouldn't all theater be imaginative?) Still, some troupes seek to differentiate themselves from the main…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:27PM[SHARE]The new musical Honeymoon in Vegas is a throwback, and not just because it's based on a 1992 movie that was, even then, somewhat retrograde in its humor. Cancel the "somewhat": The plot hing…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Would you like to see a two-hander in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a hunky but bashful British beekeeper, hemming and half-smiling, while Ruth Wilson, so recently embaubled with a Golden Glob…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:35PM[SHARE]The Suicide, Nikolai Erdman's biting 1928 satire of Soviet thought control, so overflows with ironies that they seem to slosh into real life. To begin with, the play died by its own hand: Er…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]It would not ordinarily be newsworthy that a performer named Gordon Sumner took over a secondary role in a struggling Broadway musical. You do not hear much about cast changes at On the…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]A famous agent used to instruct clients never to set a scene in a bus: Americans don't mind stories that are sad, he said, but they draw the line at downmarket depressing. Apparently Samuel …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:25AM[SHARE]Aside from "Frank Wildhorn," the two words I least want to hear in conjunction with a show I'm about to attend are "audience participation." The prospect of being dragooned into awkward dial…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:23PM[SHARE]This week, Vulture will be publishing our critics' year-end lists. Enjoy. 1. Audra McDonald in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & GrillBroadwayNot many New York productions this year were …
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:50PM[SHARE]When you enter the East 4th Street home of New York Theatre Workshop, you can never be sure what you're going to find. The blank-slate interior has been turned into an amphitheater for Caryl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]As Peter Pan is traditionally portrayed by a gamine actress, and Hairspray's Edna Turnblad by a chunky actor, theatrical tradition dictates that John Merrick, the grotesquely deformed title …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Some 17 Sally Bowleses painted their nails green and sang "Maybe This Time" for the Sam Mendes revisal of Cabaret that ran on Broadway from March 1998 (Natasha Richardson) through January 20…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]A Cornish knight, an Irish princess, and the king they both betray by falling in love: For centuries the tale circulated Europe in various forms. But after Wagner's monumental Tristan und Is…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]To begin with, A Delicate Balance is a masterpiece. I'm not sure that anything in Edward Albee's daunting catalog " some 30 plays " surpasses it. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is sadder; T…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]If Mike Nichols ever produced anything as banal as a résumé, it would have looked highly suspicious, the humblebrag of a con man. He did too many things, they were too far-flung, a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:45PM[SHARE]With all the larks praying and bird-pairs bursting in song, it's sometimes hard to hear the real voice of Oscar Hammerstein in his lyrics. But his "poetic," not to say ornithological, flight…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:15PM[SHARE]Despite what seemed like weeks of buzz about its radical transformations, the revival of Side Show that opened on Broadway tonight is not as meaningfully different from the 1997 or…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:45PM[SHARE]
