Wednesday, 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 10:16PMSunday, October 30, 2016
Classically trained actors are naturally drawn to roles that show off their verbal fluency, but few contemporary plays give them the chance. No wonder Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Da…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:05PMThursday, October 27, 2016
The heartbreaking revival of the William Finn–James Lapine musical Falsettos that opens tonight on Broadway comes, by chance, just a day after scientists reported in Nature that the longst…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, October 20, 2016
Trying to avoid the third presidential debate, I decided to watch a press screener of Fox TV’s version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show last night, thinking camp would be the perfect antid…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:53PMTuesday, October 18, 2016
It’s probably not a coincidence that three of today’s best multi-character monologists — to coin a paradoxical job title — are women of color: Anna Deavere Smith, Nilaja Sun, and Sar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, October 16, 2016
Part of what keeps great plays great, age after age, is that they have so much in them: so much psychology, amusement, conflict, philosophy, politics, emotion, and linguistic pleasure. What …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:41PMThursday, October 13, 2016
Perhaps it’s the uncertainty principle at work, but one of last year’s best dramas has somehow become one of this year’s best comedies. I’m referring to Manhattan Theatre Club’s pr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, October 10, 2016
When Broadway isn’t busy being a temple of high art, it’s more of a transient hotel, with the oddest characters showing up for short stays. The Lyceum seems to attract a lot of these mar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMThursday, October 6, 2016
In 1914, Irving Berlin, already world-famous for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” became a charter member of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Arrangers and Publishers. Until then, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMSaturday, October 1, 2016
In early 1987, the director Peter Brook and the BAM impresario Harvey Lichtenstein climbed a ladder and popped through a window of the derelict Majestic Theater on Fulton Street in Fort Gree…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:46PMThursday, September 29, 2016
In 1969, a National Geographic photographer named Loren McIntyre made what was supposed to be a three-day expedition to Brazil’s Javari Valley in search of the Mayouruna, an indigenous, it…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, September 28, 2016
Judith Light can do no wrong onstage, which isn’t to say she can save a play that gets so little right. Without her, All the Ways to Say I Love You, the hour-long monologue that opened MCC…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:30PMMonday, September 26, 2016
Narratives don’t get much more contested than that of Nat Turner, the leader of the infamous slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. To begin with, our knowledge of the even…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, September 22, 2016
Like “humanistic Judaism,” the term “investigative theater” proposes an invidious distinction. All theater investigates. What the Civilians do under that rubric is merely more litera…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:38PMMonday, September 19, 2016
Even from the beginning, Edward Albee was rarely photographed smiling — or, rather, photo editors seldom chose to print any smiling portraits that might have been taken. The truth was that…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:39AMSaturday, September 17, 2016
Richard Nelson’s Gabriel family plays, like the Apple family plays before them, are studded with topical political references; Nelson sets each installment on the day of its opening and ad…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:48PMFriday, September 16, 2016
When Taylor Mac first emerges through the power-chord fog of a 24-piece orchestra at St. Ann’s Warehouse, he is dressed in an outfit that looks as if Marie Antoinette, having survived an e…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:52PMWednesday, September 14, 2016
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973) was a gospel singer, pianist, and guitarist whose combination of holy rolling and louche swing made her one of the forgotten godparents of rock. (“Siste…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMNear the end of the three-and-a-half-hour slog that is Phaedra(s) — just when you’ve given up hope for it and, indeed, all existence — something wonderful happens. Until then, the prod…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:56PMTuesday, September 13, 2016
A sensational concert performance of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years at Town Hall last night, starring Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry, started the New York fall theater season off…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:13PMMonday, September 12, 2016
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973) was a gospel singer, pianist, and guitarist whose combination of holy rolling and louche swing made her one of the forgotten godparents of rock. (“Siste…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, September 4, 2016
Before last night’s Public Works performance of Twelfth Night at the Delacorte, Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director, bounded onstage to thank donors and explain the idea…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:01PMThursday, August 25, 2016
In adapting Daphne du Maurier’s dour novella The Birds for the movies, Alfred Hitchcock instructed his screenwriter to start the story with some screwball comedy in order to heighten the t…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, August 10, 2016
There are some things that the Public Theater — founded as the Shakespeare Workshop in 1954 and known for most of its life as the New York Shakespeare Festival — can’t avoid. The occas…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:13PMFriday, July 22, 2016
Whenever I’d hear critics describe musical theater as one of the few truly American art forms, I would think, well, at least one of those words is right. It’s a form. I suppose it is als…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:36AMTuesday, July 19, 2016
Abstract-noun titles are usually deceptive, or at least under-determined; Doubt, Democracy, and Plenty, good plays though they are, might each just as easily have been named s…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:10AMThursday, July 14, 2016
Aside from an occasional unicorn like The Humans, Off and Off–Off Broadway plays almost never dare transfer to Broadway anymore, which means that New Yorkers who miss them in their origina…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:20AMTuesday, July 12, 2016
It’s not often I think a three-hour play could profitably be longer, but J. T. Rogers’s gripping, big-boned Oslo, which opened tonight at Lincoln Center Theater, needs all the meat and m…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:01PMSunday, July 10, 2016
The Encores! Off-Center series, which opened its fourth season last night, is meant to do for Off Broadway in summer what the main Encores! season does for Broadway in spring: recall to our …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:02PMFriday, July 1, 2016
The theater is a hothouse; everything grown within it is exotic, demanding, and sensitive to minute fluctuations of environment. Even with only time as a variable, a show is always reaching …
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:00PMTuesday, June 14, 2016
How do you tame The Taming of the Shrew? It has the usual early-Shakespeare problems: clunky exposition, overwrought plotting, huge dropped stitches. (The framing device, laboriously introdu…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:33AM 
