Tuesday, 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 07:33AMMonday, June 13, 2016
Even though it did not beat the record of The Producers — which swept 12 categories in a weak season in 2001 — Hamilton’s scarfing up of 11 wins, out of 16 nominations, was obviously t…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:42PMSaturday, June 11, 2016
Late intelligence suggests that many of my Tony predictions, as analyzed over the past week in a series of deep dives—see installments one, two, three, four, and f…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:42PMFriday, June 10, 2016
The Tony Awards and the Tony Awards telecast are not the same thing. The former has flaws; the latter usually has little else. One prediction I feel confident in making is that this year’s…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:31PMIn part due to Hamilton’s dominance, the musical performance categories have been fairly straightforward; the Tony nominators hit their marks and the voters are likely to do so as well. No…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:32AMWednesday, June 8, 2016
Now that we’ve reached the performance categories — musicals today, plays tomorrow — the time has come to discuss snubs and splits, none of which exist. Snubs are nominations that didn…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:33PMTuesday, June 7, 2016
Twenty nonmusical plays — nine new ones and eleven revivals — were produced on Broadway this season. Only three in each group were complete duds: Misery, China Doll, and O…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:09PMMonday, June 6, 2016
As subversions go, you could hardly trump David Javerbaum’s An Act of God, which plays like a lay-’em-in-the-aisles one-man comedy despite being (as I wrote in my review of its limited r…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:18PMTwenty plays and 16 musicals opened during the 2015–2016 Broadway season. Most of the plays were pretty good or better; most of the musicals were not. Despite this, the musicals, as always…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:18PMThursday, May 26, 2016
Which would you rather experience in the theater: too many ideas or too few? The Total Bent, at the Public, is in the maximalist camp, offering in less than two hours a dense sociological hi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:06AMTuesday, May 24, 2016
When the very first lyric of a sung-through show like Hadestown attempts to rhyme “flames” with “hurricanes,” you know you’re in for a crossover experience. And though I doubt that…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:23AMSaturday, May 21, 2016
Many a Golden Age musical has grown musty with overfamiliarity and rote revival. And many a hit show, unable to maintain discipline or accommodate replacements, grows ragged during a long ru…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:27PMWednesday, May 18, 2016
Unless cunnilingus is part of the late Victorian housekeeping routine, the studly footman and nubile maid seem to have seriously misinterpreted the task of straightening the bed. How daring …
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:44AMFriday, May 13, 2016
Though Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim are arguably the two greatest writers of American musical theater, their one collaboration — Do I Hear a Waltz? — was a fizzle. Some of the re…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:03AMTuesday, May 3, 2016
In any Tony season, the idea of snubs is a little ridiculous; there’s never been a conspiracy to deny Sutton Foster her next award. Among the nominators, who are generally not affiliated w…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:08PMDoes Hamilton have a chance to beat the record set by The Producers for the most Tony wins — 12? Mathematically, yes. But to do this it would have to sweep all 13 categories in which …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:08PMMonday, May 2, 2016
Musicals are uniquely adept at telling large stories about individuals in conflict with society—so capable of doing so that we sometimes forget how smart they can be about individuals in c…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:30AMSunday, May 1, 2016
The first thing Blanche DuBois does when she arrives at her sister’s “sort of messed up” flat in New Orleans is to locate the liquor and avail herself of a stiff one. Like many charact…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:06PMThursday, April 28, 2016
The Broadway musical season that began with a Hamiltonian bang last August has now ended with another historical explosion, this one detonated by the playwright and director George C. Wolfe.…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:54PMApparently, Jessica Lange had a path in mind. You might call it the Tandy Trajectory: that sequence of classic American roles, all memorably played by Jessica Tandy, from Blanche DuBois in A…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:13PMWednesday, April 27, 2016
The age of a show’s protagonist often provides a clue to the age of the audience the show is pitched to: Patrick in American Psycho is 27; Jenna in Waitress is “in her thirties”; the c…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PMTuesday, April 26, 2016
I don’t know if it qualifies as part of Broadway’s ongoing diversity initiative, but in Fully Committed, the one-man comedy opening tonight at the Lyceum, that Ginger-American Jesse Tyle…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:07AMMonday, April 25, 2016
A lot of the preview press for the new Broadway musical Waitress, which opened tonight at the Brooks Atkinson, concerned its groundbreakingly all-female creative team: Sara Bareilles (songs)…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:37AMFriday, April 22, 2016
Possibly the most sickening thing about the new musical American Psycho, aside from the fact that it exists on Broadway, is its transparent splash curtain, which even at the beginning of the…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:42AMThursday, April 14, 2016
All stage stars seduce their audiences, but how? The winkers do it coyly, the vamps brazenly, the intensos while pretending not to notice you are there. The slightly kinky way Frank Langella…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:54PMFriday, April 1, 2016
According to one survey of high school lit teachers, The Crucible by Arthur Miller is the most widely taught play, outside of Shakespeare, in American classrooms. (A Raisin in the Sun and De…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:35AMThursday, March 31, 2016
Like the thirteen colonies awkwardly hammered into a union, the musical 1776, which is about that hammering, is a bizarre construction that should not work. The idea for the show was outr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:59PMTuesday, March 29, 2016
It’s easy to understand why playwrights as diverse as Archibald MacLeish (in the verse epic J.B.) and Neil Simon (in the shticky God’s Favorite) have been drawn to the Book of …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:50PMFriday, March 25, 2016
At some point between its San Diego premiere in September 2014 and its pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center earlier this winter, the musical Bright Star, which bows at the Cort tonight,…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:33AMWednesday, March 23, 2016
After the first week of a four-week Phase I trial for a dopamine stimulator called RLU37, the test subjects not only show signs of elevated mood and increased energy but have lost weight and…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:09AMThursday, March 17, 2016
Unless you’re a fanatic with money to burn, you’ve most likely heard your favorite musicals more than you’ve seen them. Many a Cats fancier never made it to the Winter Garden to pet th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:55PM 
