Monday, April 16, 2018
The new staging of the musical is an intimate extravaganza, packed with ideas about the body, gender roles, and fear of closeness.
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Monday, February 19, 2018
Hilton Als writes that in the playwright’s latest work, his slick cynicism threatens to overtake his real gifts.
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The director and playwright is back, with “Paradiso,” a work that explores his interest in myth and the mundane.
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Jocelyn Bioh’s play comments on our fascinating era, in which so much debate centers on the female body.
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As the rock icon sang, it became clear that the show allowed him to understand not only himself but what goes into the making of a self.
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Bette Midler is such an incredible self-creation—an artist like no other—that finding roles that can harness her enormous energy while allowing room for her wit and her extraordinary ski…
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Arthur Miller’s “The Price” (in revival at the American Airlines, under the direction of Terry Kinney) premièred on Broadway in 1968, four years after Miller’s other mid-career play…
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When “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” opened on Broadway, in 1968, it featured one of the best young casts ever to appear in an American musical. Diane Keaton, Melba Moore, …
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When Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart put together the musical “Lady in the Dark,” in 1940, Freud was big. The great man’s thinking had yet to come under wide attack, and psycho…
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Throughout his career, James Baldwin had a hankering to work in show business. Like Henry James, one of his early heroes, Baldwin loved the footlights; early on, with his friend and editor S…
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Writing that gets under your skin, in your bones, will play in your head and memory like nothing else. While painting, photography, and movies can come at you with a very particular force—…
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While it’s always a treat to see amazing ensembles working together as they tear a play apart, the better to expose its meaning, it’s thrilling in a different way to watch performers who…
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Here we go again, back to that terrible summer house in New England, which is yet another depressed character in Eugene O’Neill’s unsurpassable “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (now…
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In 1962, Lillian and Helen Ross published “The Player,” a wonderful collection of interviews with actors, ranging from Maureen Stapleton to Sidney Poitier, many of which originated in th…
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I have so many complicated responses to David Harrower’s 2005 play, “Blackbird” (at the Belasco), that trying to separate what I feel about the subject tangentially and what Harrower a…
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All this talk about diversity—in newspapers, on college campuses, at the Oscars—can be hard on a liberal white guy. How’s a sensitive Caucasian man—no Trumpite—supposed to deal wit…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:21PMDirectors who have an interest in style are not prevalent in the American theatre. Mostly, directors are there to serve the play and keep the bodies moving in space as clearly, effectively, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:21PMI’m always somewhat surprised to discover how many of the writers and thinkers I’ve admired over the years grew up reading Eugene O’Neill with a passion equal to my own. For years, I t…
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It was always exciting to see, around town, those lovely posters by Paul Davis announcing a new production at the Public Theatre—“our” theatre, over on Lafayette Street, a place that p…
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In 2007, the theatre artists and activists Katie Cappiello and Meg McInerney founded the Arts Effect All-Girl Theatre Company. There, the directors provided a forum for teen-age girls, where…
SOURCE: www.newyorker.com?p%3D3158082?mbid%3Drss at 12:35PMMonday, December 28, 2015
Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on famil…
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The language around Christmas is usually pretty treacly, as befits the season. But future writers should remember that one of the amazing things about the holiday’s ur-text, Charles Dicken…
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Robert O’Hara’s new play, “Barbecue” (directed with vigor and understanding by Kent Gash, at the Public), is my idea of an American classic, or the kind of classic we need. Although …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:34AMFriday, August 14, 2015
I first heard the poet and comedian Lord Buckley’s sui-generis, incredible music-as-talk during a dance performance by Karole Armitage. This was a number of years ago, but sometimes, when …
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I want to say a special word about Dave Malloy’s “Preludes,” because it is the work of an artist who is not afraid to try things, or to create worlds that haven’t necessarily been se…
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The Public Theatre is currently hosting two inspired, cogent artists from different cultures, whose distance from each other is bridged by Josephine Baker’s butt. Upstairs, near the admini…
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To watch Larry David make his Broadway début, in his self-penned “Fish in the Dark” (at the Cort), in the same week that Helen Mirren stars as Queen Elizabeth II, in Peter Morgan’s �…
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For fifteen years, the actor Jim Fletcher has worked with the important theatre director and writer Richard Maxwell, whose shows require an uncommon degree of silence from the performers. In…
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There is so much good will and enthusiasm these days among theatregoers who have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s complicated, valuable musical “Hamilton” (directed by Thomas Kail, at the Pub…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMSunday, January 18, 2015
While most ten-best lists are posted at the end of the year, I prefer to send mine along at the beginning, when the world, culturally at least, is still a bit of a tabula rasa, and one’s m…
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