Wednesday, March 1, 2017
We 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 10:11PMMonday, February 27, 2017
Again with the whining! It would take a review longer than this space permits to explore how David Mamet, the great bard of the grifty underclass in early plays like American Buffalo and Gle…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:25PMThursday, February 23, 2017
A 98-year-old woman named Marie sits in a wheelchair surveying the Georges Seurat painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMTuesday, February 21, 2017
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins — a MacArthur genius, a Pulitzer finalist, and a recipient of Yale’s Windham–Campbell Literature Prize — gets my award for most-restless playwright. Five of hi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, February 16, 2017
For at least 30 years, Wallace Shawn has been warning theatergoers about totalitarianism: how near it is, how easily we might acquiesce in it. I have to admit I’ve sometimes found his alar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:47PMThursday, February 9, 2017
It’s easy to see why Stephen Sondheim and the team of Kander and Ebb each took a stab at musicalizing Sunset Boulevard. The still-startling 1950 movie, directed and co-written by Billy Wil…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:47PMIt might be possible to enjoy the musical Big River by squinting. It is, after all, based on Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, whose main events — Huck’s escape from his…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:50PMThursday, January 19, 2017
August Wilson was still a young artist, if no longer a young man, when he started work on Jitney at age 34. Was the play, about some car-service drivers scratching out a living, meant as a o…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:17PMWednesday, January 18, 2017
On October 20, 1981, six members of an organization called the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brink’s armored truck at the Nanuet Mall, killing a Brink’s guard and then two policemen who…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:48PMSunday, January 15, 2017
In a dank and grimy cottage in a small town in remote Connemara live the embittered fortyish spinster Maureen Folan and her spiteful mother, Mag, whose name rhymes with “hag” for good re…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:27PMThursday, January 5, 2017
Barring last-minute announcements — unlikely because every available theater is booked — 24 productions are scheduled to open on Broadway between now and the Tony Awards cutoff at the en…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:42PMFriday, December 16, 2016
Nine high-school girls on a soccer team somewhere in suburbia yack and confide and bluster and gossip, all at once, about everything from the Khmer Rouge to the relative merits of pads versu…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:15PMMonday, December 12, 2016
As befits its all-or-nothing love story, Othello is Shakespeare’s most intense play, in part because it eschews his usual ADHD dramaturgy. The tragedy of the Moorish general who becomes a …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:32PMSunday, December 11, 2016
Maybe an a cappella stage musical could make sense: The sound of unaccompanied voices in tight harmony can be compelling, and the genre has proved successful in the Pitch Perfect movies. A b…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:30PMThursday, December 8, 2016
It hasn’t been a great year for new musicals; only one — Dear Evan Hansen — made my list of the top ten theatrical productions of 2016. Several others were great in part: the design of…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThe nearly perfect 2002 stage musical Hairspray is so hardy you don’t notice how carefully it’s crafted. The score, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, is of course part of that, bringing…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:20PMWednesday, December 7, 2016
In 2010, two years before she became famous as the author of Wild, Cheryl Strayed took over writing the “Dear Sugar” advice column from a friend. She had none of the skills that traditio…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, December 4, 2016
The big problem in writing great musicals is not the difficulty of writing great songs. The big problem is that the songs, great or not, are cannibals, picking the stories clean and leaving …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, December 1, 2016
There’s a good reason Broadway musicals traditionally leave the gangsters backstage. Except when handled with the greatest skill — as in, say, Guys and Dolls — stories that include mob…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, November 30, 2016
It’s not impossible to find the right tone for a musical comedy about a gruesome subject: Look at Little Shop of Horrors, which both satirizes and honors the implications of its bloodthirs…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, November 28, 2016
“You are no Larry Kramer,” the Academic shouts at his boyfriend, the Writer, a hothead on a tear about homophobic violence. “This isn’t Boys in the Band,” the Writer later sn…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:43PMMonday, November 21, 2016
When asked in a recent interview what inspired him to write This Day Forward, the playwright Nicky Silver immediately answered, “other writers’ successes.” If only any line of the play…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMI met Andy at a party in 1995. Soon afterward, he phoned the host, a mutual friend, to get my number so he could invite me to a play. As it happened, the mutual friend, hearing the descripti…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:18PMSunday, November 20, 2016
Probably the strangest and least revivable Broadway genre is the midcentury hooker musical comedy. Shows like Irma La Douce (first produced in 1956), New Girl in Town (1957), and House of Fl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:00PMThursday, November 17, 2016
Though he has no prior professional theater credits, Jason Sudeikis holds the stage with confidence and verve as the inspiring prep school teacher John Keating in the adaptation of Dead Poet…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:15PMTuesday, November 15, 2016
Sometimes, with a good-enough playwright, it’s good to have no idea what’s going on. That was the case for me with Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entir…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, November 14, 2016
How can it be that a show based on the most serious novel of all time is both the most gorgeous new musical in town and, for much of its length, the silliest? That may be a self-answering qu…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMWednesday, November 9, 2016
After the opening-night audience at Women of a Certain Age gave the cast a well-deserved standing ovation and started to file out of the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall, ushers could be hea…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:47PMMonday, November 7, 2016
Hally is a whiny, pretentious, self-involved, 17-year-old nerd. Sam and Willie are dignified workingmen in their mid-40s. Nevertheless, Hally is “Master Harold” and Sam and Willie are th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, November 3, 2016
Lynn Nottage’s gripping but disappointing new play Sweat, which opens tonight at the Public, arrives in New York from its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival trailing hosanna…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, November 2, 2016
“I always talk in stories; they really illustrate points,” says Michael Tubbs, a councilman running for mayor of Stockton, California. Actually, it’s Anna Deavere Smith who speaks thes…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:16PM 
