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 09:00PMThere’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 10:00PMIt’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 09:00PM“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 04:43PMWhen 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 02:18PMProbably 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 05:00PMThough 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 07:15PMSometimes, 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 10:00PMHow 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 08:00PMAfter 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 02:47PMHally 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 10:00PMLynn 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 10:00PM“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 10:16PMClassically 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 10:05PMThe 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 09:00PMTrying 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 02:53PMIt’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 10:00PMPart 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 09:41PMPerhaps 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 09:00PMWhen 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 08:00PMIn 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 08:00PMIn 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 05:46PMIn 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 10:00PMJudith 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 08:30PMNarratives 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 09:00PMLike “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 04:38PMEven 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 09:39AMRichard 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 05:48PMWhen 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 04:52PMSister 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 10:00PM
