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 03:56PMA 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 01:13PMSister 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 10:00PMBefore 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 07:01PMIn 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 10:00PMThere 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 08:13PMWhenever 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 06:36AMAbstract-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 06:10AMAside 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 07:20AMIt’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 08:01PMThe 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 07:02PMThe 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 05:00PMHow 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 07:33AMEven 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 05:42PMLate 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 10:42PMThe 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 05:32AMNow 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 10:33PMTwenty 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 10:09PMAs 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 10:18PMWhich 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 06:06AMWhen 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 08:23AMMany 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 03:27PMUnless 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 05:44AMThough 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 07:03AMIn 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 11:08PMMusicals 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 10:30AMThe 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 11:06PM
