Our critics debate a varied, and divisive, Broadway season.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 11:12AMIn numerous subplots set against a vicious civil war, Martín Zimmerman’s play explores the contagion of culpability.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 08:06PMOur new co-chief theater critic, Jesse Green, offers his take on Ms. Wiest’s work in this Beckett revival. Follow him on Twitter (@JesseKGreen) and Facebook (jesse.green.critic).
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 08:24PMOur new co-chief theater critic, Jesse Green, makes his reviewing debut with this Sondheim musical. Follow him on Twitter (@JesseKGreen) and Facebook (jesse.green.critic).
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 07:48PMThe co-chief theater critics Ben Brantley and Jesse Green, on the nominated plays, musicals and actors.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 12:06PMOfferings include a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Venus,” at the Signature Theater, and Robert Schenkkan’s “Building the Wall,” at New World Stages.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:36PMIn order to explain what’s good about Bandstand, a serious-minded original musical opening on Broadway tonight, it helps to know what’s bad about some of its predecessors on the Boulevar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWhen it debuted in 1990, John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation played like a satire of liberal values after the hugely disruptive confusions of a decade of Reaganism. The married couple a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMany a Broadway musical adaptation seems like an Ikea product you’re supposed to admire just because someone was able to assemble it. Anastasia, opening tonight at the Broadhurst, is that …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PMThough often described as confections, musical comedies have no known recipe. If they did, a show like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which opened on Broadway tonight, ought to have been…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMPre-production publicity for Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, which opens tonight at the Signature, revealed only that it is “a play about people telling stories about telling stories.” Th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThe show curtain now in use at the Shubert Theatre, where the ecstatic revival of Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler opens tonight, may be the reddest red-red I’ve ever seen. The beaded g…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMLillian Hellman’s breakneck melodrama The Little Foxes was written in 1939 on the Depression plan. It has one set, no more characters than it can use, and just enough plot to make it go. Y…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMOne of the reasons Shakespeare’s history plays are the greatest examples of their genre is that he took care to write about events no one could possibly remember. (They were set eons befor…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMDiplomacy is a lovely word, suggesting the idea that with tact and perseverance humans can accommodate one another. Yeah, sure. If that seems unlikely, so does the idea that diplomacy could …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThe last half-hour or so of War Paint, the beguiling but frustrating new musical about beauty legends Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, is just about everything you could want from a Br…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMNoël Coward described his 1939 romp Present Laughter as “a series of semiautobiographical pyrotechnics” — merely “semi,” presumably, because the main character, Garry Essendin…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTo my knowledge, Zeno’s paradox has never been recruited as a plot point and thematic touchstone in a Broadway musical before Amélie, the wistful new show starring Phillipa Soo that…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:06PMFarce is not an acquired taste; even babies laugh at pratfalls. Rather, farce is the taste you fail to grow out of — and thank God, because sometimes only the stupidest fun will do. If thi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:46PMThere’s something about our time that doesn’t favor expressionism, especially in mainstream theater. The distortion of perspective and the inflation of emotional state that we may enjoy …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:13PMWhen a play’s title is Latin History for Morons, you may not want to be one of the title characters. Nevertheless, that’s what you are in John Leguizamo’s new stand-up-act-posing-as-a-…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:04PMA spring theater preview mostly means a spring Broadway preview, since April is the month in which many of the year’s biggest-ticket shows rush the end zone. (To be eligible for this seaso…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:36PMYou probably already know whether you like Miss Saigon, the pop-opera retread of Madama Butterfly set against the collapse of the American experiment in Vietnam. If you do like it, by all me…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:01PMDon’t let the lovely silvery MGM draperies fool you, nor the silky gorgeousness of the orchestrations: The New Yorkers, the latest Encores! reclamation project, is a clumsy, instructive, d…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:26PMTypically, Sarah Ruhl’s plays sound like your smartest friend stoned. They unfurl in tendrils of dialogue that are both organic and perseverant, fantastic and philosophical. Because the pl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:03PMWe are used to thinking of Arthur Miller as a restless moralist: an American superego salesman with a big territory to cover. But being a playwright, he is also of course a sensualist; his d…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:05PMAs you head to your seat for the new David Byrne musical Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, at the Public, you may smile upon seeing a painted stage drop bearing the legend “She was warned. She w…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMThe Playwrights Realm enjoyed a major success last year with The Wolves, a marvelous, eye-opening play by Sarah DeLappe that flipped the tropes of the men-in-sports genre to explore the live…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:30PMSurely we have reached the point with Tennessee Williams’s great plays — if not, perhaps, his lesser ones — where it is desirable and even necessary to deploy them in new ways. They ar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:20PMWhat is Jordan Berman’s problem? He’s 28, adorkably gay, and gainfully employed at an advertising agency. His trio of college besties — Kiki, Vanessa, and Laura — coo over him like a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMWe do not question, despite their umpteen revivals, whether the theater “needs” another production of Othello or The Cherry Orchard or Waiting for Godot. Nor should we with Sweeney Todd,…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:11PM