Monday, January 16, 2012
In 1985, a performer named Lady Bunny founded Wigstock, in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, and the dream was this: drag artists like Bunny and RuPaul (then relatively unknown) would s…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, January 9, 2012
The theatrical pioneer Joe Cino wasn’t interested in the mundane. The operatic highs and lows of his life weren’t separate from his great creation: a café that’s large…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, December 12, 2011
After Mrs. Alice Hauptmann (Zoe Caldwell) held my right hand in her small, scarlet-nailed fingers and looked at me spiritlessly while smiling a perfunctory little smile for what felt like a …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 28, 2011
Part of what makes Diane Keaton’s memoir, “Then Again,” truly amazing is that she does away with the star’s “me” and replaces it with a daughter’s &…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 21, 2011
Nellie McKay has the sort of considerable talent—basically she’s an actress who sings, which is to say a monologuist with her own distinct sound—that makes us all feel we h…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 14, 2011
At first I didn’t get it. But soon after I started seeing Thomas Bradshaw’s plays, in 2008, Rochelle Owens’s voice began to insinuate its way into my thoughts as well. It …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 7, 2011
Long ago, before Manhattan’s meatpacking district was a cavernous, stress-inducing playground, a number of clubs there were home to a different kind of noise. At Jackie 60, run by the …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 31, 2011
First-generation American writers often have two stories to tell. There’s the story of their inspiration and the quest for a discipline to give form to their imaginings. Then thereR…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMCharlotte Rampling is a living paradox: an actress whose allure depends less on the passion she ignites than on her efforts to stamp out—or to avoid—admiration. It seems as if sh…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 24, 2011
Historically speaking, the stage is a notoriously difficult space for novelists to fill. Henry James is a famous example of a brilliant writer whose dreams of footlight glory were not meant …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 10, 2011
When I went to Ellen Stewart’s memorial last winter—she died at the age of ninety-one—I met several people who had not only worked with her on the stage but helped her crea…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 3, 2011
The stuff that’s always interested me about “The Threepenny Opera” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the marquee names most closely associated with the pie…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFew artists and writers of color haven’t at least heard of the Hatch-Billops Collection. Situated on lower Broadway, in Manhattan, the collection, which was founded by the theatre hist…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, September 26, 2011
When Alfred Preisser and Christopher McElroen founded the Classical Theatre of Harlem, in 1999, they started off auspiciously, staging works ranging from “Medea” to Jean Genet…
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As audience members took their seats before a recent performance of the director Diane Paulus's politically radical and dramaturgically original musical adaptation of DuBose and Dorothy Heyw…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:20AMMonday, September 19, 2011
The theatre can kill a man. As in the art and film worlds, which the stage sometimes brushes up against but never entirely submits to—Thalia and Melpomene are pretty haughty girls̵…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, July 18, 2011
I'm not really much of an opera queen. When, among my gay male friends of the eighties, the talk turned to opera seria versus the "reform" operas of the mid-eighteenth century, say, or opera…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:15PM 
