Thursday, 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 10:55PMTuesday, March 15, 2016
Clarence McCrane, better known as Strings, is “the third biggest crossover star in the history of country music.” In Hold On to Me Darling, Kenneth Lonergan’s lumpy and scattershot new…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:14PMMonday, March 14, 2016
The first mistake writers of musicals usually make happens before they write: They choose too good or too bad a source. Too good is the more difficult case; the material, having given them d…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:23PMSunday, March 13, 2016
Danai Gurira’s devastating Eclipsed, about four women enslaved as “wives” to a rebel commander during the Liberian civil war, opens this Sunday on Broadway after a sold-out run at the …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:13PMIt takes a special kind of pluck, or vanity, to name your musical Disaster! and not expect critics to agree. But then everything about the campy little show of that name that’s opening ton…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:13PMThe theater is dying. The theater is dead. Oh, look, it’s reviving; no, it’s dead again. It’s always been that way — yet suddenly, now it isn’t. For the first time since losing its…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:13PMThrough heavy walls and a warren of hallways, before I’m even buzzed into the studio, I recognize Audra McDonald’s voice. She’s just doing vocalise: singing scales on the syllables eh …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:07PMThe first word spoken in David Harrower’s Blackbird is “shock,” and the superb production that opens on Broadway tonight wastes no time in justifying it. Not so much in speech; the nex…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:04PMOn the stage of the Booth Theater, the scenic designer Christopher Oram has built a magnificent ruin of a once-respectable hotel, complete with double-height lobby, an antique elevator, and …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:04PMTuesday, February 23, 2016
Serious naturalism is the New York house style this season, with works like The Humans, Eclipsed, and Blackbird highlighting the spring Broadway lineup. What a surprise, then, that for the l…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:33AMMonday, February 22, 2016
When Mark Rylance accepted the 2008 Tony award for his performance in the French farce Boeing-Boeing, and when he accepted again in 2011 for his performance in the English drama Jerusalem, h…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:45PMFriday, February 19, 2016
The entire action of Stephen Karam’s play The Humans takes place in the Chinatown apartment that 26-year-old Brigid Blake has just moved into with her boyfriend, Richard Saad. It’s a dup…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:49AMThursday, February 18, 2016
Sam Shepard had already been writing for the theater for 14 years when Buried Child won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. The play—his 23rd or so, depending on how you count—was both a distill…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:20AMFriday, February 12, 2016
Four Harvard graduates walk into a scene: Valerie, a young African-American actor; Jackson, an African-American surgical intern; Ginny, a Chinese-Japanese-American psychology professor; and …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:29AMThursday, February 11, 2016
One of the many useful and fascinating things the Encores! series has done over the years — last night’s opening of Cabin in the Sky marks the start of its 23rd season — is to highligh…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:02PMA playwright enters dangerous territory when he attempts to dramatize his struggle to become an artist: a struggle that is supposedly resolved, or at least justified, by the artistry he now …
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:25AMTuesday, February 9, 2016
My Kindle tells me that it takes an average reader some ten hours to get through Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The delightful Bedlam stage version, which had a successful run in 201…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:10AMTuesday, February 2, 2016
If theater is a hot medium, musical theater burns, making it a particularly bad match for the coolness of television. The three recent live musicals on NBC (The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, Th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:53PMFriday, January 29, 2016
Stephen Karam’s Chinatown apartment, which he moved into after the success of his 2011 play Sons of the Prophet, is a huge step up from his last place. Yes, the elevator is tetchy, and the…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:40PMThursday, January 28, 2016
Every year, American Theatre magazine publishes a list of the country’s most-produced playwrights. It makes sense that Ayad Akhtar topped the latest edition: His award-winning plays, many …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:53AMThursday, January 21, 2016
Anna Cantor, the title character of Our Mother’s Brief Affair, is a suburban matron, a passive-aggressive parent, and, even in the throes of semi-dementia, a genius with a barb. (As long a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:44PMWednesday, January 20, 2016
Will we ever stop arguing about Mother Courage and Her Children? From the time Brecht wrote it, in 1939, as Fascism was approaching its orgasm in Europe, until three weeks ago, when Tonya Pi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:48PMThursday, January 14, 2016
The key thing about farce isn’t the slamming of doors but the solidity of walls; without rigid order there can be no liberating chaos. The carpentry is crucial, and I doubt there’s ever …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:33PMMonday, January 11, 2016
When Hamilton opened Off Broadway at the Public Theater last February, and then transferred to Broadway in August, many of the reviews, including mine, used words like historic, groundbreaki…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:56PMSunday, December 20, 2015
It’s hard enough to revive a musical that didn’t work the first time; that’s why John Doyle’s new version of The Color Purple is rightfully such a sensation. But it may be an even ha…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMSaturday, December 19, 2015
There are several ways to define a Broadway theater, all tautological. It’s a theater that uses a Broadway contract. It’s a theater in the Broadway district — Sixth Avenue to Eighth Av…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:21PMWednesday, December 16, 2015
Whether you will like These Paper Bullets! — the new Bard–on–Carnaby Street confection at the Atlantic — will probably depend on how much you like Much Ado About Nothing. Depend inve…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:54AMFriday, December 11, 2015
How can deprivation become joy? That’s not only the animating question of The Color Purple, the 1982 Alice Walker novel made into a musical in 2005, but also the operating principle behind…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:18AMWednesday, December 9, 2015
This week Vulture will be publishing our critics’ year-end lists. Monday we ran TV and movies. Tuesday covered albums, songs, and books. Today, look for theater, art, and classical perform…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:30AMTuesday, December 8, 2015
Here’s a sampling of things you’ll experience at Lazarus, the illustrated concept album disguised as a musical now playing at New York Theatre Workshop: one alien, two serial killers, th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:53AMMonday, December 7, 2015
A disreputable charmer brings the joy of music to a staid community while stirring up romance with an uptight lady: If the plot of School of Rock sounds like a great musical, that’s becaus…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:14PM 
