Saturday, September 17, 2016
Growing up in Manhattan in the eighties, I loved the TV commercials for the electronics chain “Crazy Eddie.” What kid wouldn’t? The pitchman, an unholy mashup of Pee-wee Herman and Don…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:58AMFriday, July 22, 2016
Most theatregoers I know have an almost physical aversion to audience participation. That’s probably because audience members are often cast in the role of patsy—set up to look awkward, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:11PMMonday, June 13, 2016
For more than a year now, any half-conscious prognosticator could have told you that the 2016 Antoinette Perry Awards would unofficially be the “Hamilton” Tonys. Mostly, it was. Nominate…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:15PMFriday, May 6, 2016
On April 5, 1895, Oscar Wilde was holed up at the Cadogan Hotel, in London, torn between fleeing the country and facing a parlous fate. Spurred by his sometime paramour Lord Alfred Douglas, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:01AMTuesday, May 3, 2016
Yesterday, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition released its annual report of “Ethnic Representation on New York Stages.” On Broadway and Off, thirty per cent of available role…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:12PMWednesday, April 20, 2016
Not long ago, a resident of the Financial District named Evan Miles settled in for a theatrical production on Forty-second Street. He was not an experienced playgoer—actually, this was his…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:26PMFriday, March 25, 2016
Of the many allusions woven throughout Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score for “Hamilton”—“The Pirates of Penzance,” the Notorious B.I.G.—one of the funniest comes in Act II, when Alexa…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:44AMSunday, March 13, 2016
Until a few weeks ago, if you wanted to see Africa represented in a Broadway show, you had two options, both ridiculous. There is the colorful puppet wilderness of “The Lion King,” in wh…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:07PMTuesday, November 17, 2015
The theatre has the power—more like the prerogative—to warp reality to suit its own ends, exiting the literal world through whatever trapdoors it creates. Why does an angel crash through…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:34PMFriday, August 21, 2015
Movie stars crash-landing on Broadway seems de rigueur, but last season “Fun Home” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” led the pack without famous names. This fal…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:35AMFriday, August 7, 2015
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rightfully lauded hip-hop musical “Hamilton,” which has just opened on Broadway after a smash run at the Public, is about many things, among them men: how they fig…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:45AMWednesday, June 10, 2015
Broadway loves a messy, washed-up diva who cleans up (only so much) for a comeback, and on Monday night that diva was “Smash.” It’s been two years since NBC cancelled the series, a mus…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:22PMMonday, June 8, 2015
The Tony Awards broadcast is an act of contortion, in which one medium (live theatre) simultaneously puffs itself up and scrunches itself down to fit into another (television). Every once in…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:46PMMonday, May 25, 2015
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
It’s a bad day to be Harvey Weinstein’s assistant. That is, a particularly bad day. The Pooh-Bah of Oscar campaigning cannonballed into Broadway this year, as the lead producer of “Fin…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:43PMFriday, March 27, 2015
The playwright Joshua Harmon is thirty-one years old and currently in his third year at Juilliard. He lives on the Upper West Side, because Wendy Wasserstein lived there, too. The first play…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 09:30AMFriday, February 27, 2015
Broadway is an old dog, slow to learn new tricks. But every now and then it aces one of its old tricks. The audiences who flocked to Lincoln Center’s 2008 revival of “South Pacific” wo…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMWednesday, December 24, 2014
For the past year or so, a certain segment of the population—musical-theatre fans who were children in the eighties and thought they were too good for Andrew Lloyd Webber—has experienced…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, October 3, 2014
As revealed in a new memoir, “Not My Father’s Son,” Mr. Cumming lived for years under the long shadow of his father — or, at least, the man he thought was his father.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 07:10PMMonday, June 23, 2014
One night this spring, Amanda Burden went to see the new Broadway musical “If/Then.” She had recently returned from a “psychic healing” retreat in Arizona, having spe…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, June 9, 2014
Monday, June 2, 2014
Among the trends on Broadway this season: musicals about sixties girl rockers (Janis Joplin, Carole King); bravura performances by men in drag (Neil Patrick Harris, Mark Rylance); and raw eg…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, May 30, 2014
Shakespeare’s women, Harold Bloom has observed, are always marrying down. Is Orlando truly worthy of Rosalind, with her panoptic wit? How does Viola wind up with that ninny Orsino? Per…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMWednesday, May 28, 2014
Monday, April 14, 2014
Two aspiring trampoliners arrived the other day at Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM), a fitness and dance studio in Williamsburg, described by its founder, Elizabeth Streb, as a “b…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMSunday, April 13, 2014
It’s not often that a single member of the audience commands more attention than the action onstage.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:16PMFriday, February 21, 2014
The new documentary “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me” shows its eighty-nine-year-old subject’s ferocious dual nature.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:31PMMonday, November 11, 2013
Somewhere in the bowels of the Belasco Theatre, long considered to be haunted by its namesake, the actor Mark Rylance has installed a Ping-Pong table. “I like to encourage a playful pl…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMThursday, October 31, 2013
I sat directly behind Stephen Sondheim at a performance of “Fun Home,” a new musical at the Public.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:39PMTuesday, October 29, 2013
Since Janis Joplin died, in the fall of 1970, her younger siblings, Laura and Michael Joplin, have jointly watched over her estate.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:08PMMonday, September 2, 2013
By the time Vickie Lynn Hogan was twenty-six, she had made a name for herself, having modelled for Guess jeans and appeared on the cover of Playboy. The name was Anna Nicole Smith. A native …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM 
