Monday, 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 07:14PMFriday, December 4, 2015
Only in a weak Broadway field could The Wiz have won seven Tony awards, as it did in 1975. Its competition included Mack & Mabel, Shenandoah, and The Lieutenant (which ran for two weeks)…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:40PMThe opening number of Gigantic, a new musical set at a summer camp for hefty teens, is actually called “The Weight Is Over.” That’s about the high tide of wit in this chore of a show, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:40PMAl Pacino is not an actor of much breadth but he stakes a narrow territory deeply, and that can be brilliant to watch onstage. China Doll, his shaky new Broadway vehicle, by David Mamet, off…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:40PMThursday, December 3, 2015
There is no such thing as a wholly true play. The nature of the theater distorts reality, finding all sorts of holes in the historical record and inexorably filling them in. (Actors have to …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:28AMSunday, November 29, 2015
Just before the final preview of New York Animals last night, Eric Tucker, the show’s director, warned the audience that the “glamorous and exacting” play about to begin was still bein…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:45PMTuesday, November 24, 2015
“Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” said George S. Kaufman, but that was 90 years ago. Today most satire closes — that is, shuts down internally — before it ever hits the stag…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:12AMThursday, November 19, 2015
How many Steves does it take to screw up a marriage? Steven and Stephen are a long-term couple with an 8-year-old son and intimacy issues. Steven’s old friend Matt, and Matt’s partner, B…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:39AMMonday, November 16, 2015
The meta-drama of Arthur Miller’s plays, much in evidence during this, his centenary year, is the conflict between his moral energy and the theatrical formats in which he (sometimes only b…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00AMSunday, November 15, 2015
It’s an odd paradox that as Broadway fare grows more generic, genre pieces flail. Suspense is especially moribund; A Time to Kill tanked in 2013, and it may be that the last really success…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PMFriday, November 13, 2015
Critics, if not theatergoers, often bemoan the tide of revivals flooding Broadway each fall. This season, the ratio of old plays to new is about two to one. But why should revivals be consid…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:40AMThursday, November 12, 2015
British actors have a ritual — or at least Ian McKellen does, because I saw him do it once — of blessing a new stage by kissing it. (He then recited a Shakespearean monologue, but that p…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:57PMTuesday, November 10, 2015
When a play trains its basilisk gaze on a demographic you belong to, it may seem as if the playwright took notes inside your head. That’s how I felt, anyway, at Dada Woof Papa Hot, Peter P…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:21AMMonday, November 9, 2015
The home that Isaac returns to at the beginning of Taylor Mac’s smart but deliberately disorienting new play Hir is not the one he left when he enlisted as a Marine three years e…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:24AMFriday, November 6, 2015
I’m no fan of jukebox musicals. If they’re the type that tell an invented tale, like Mamma Mia! or Rock of Ages, the book is generally rendered idiotic by the effort to accommodate the s…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:15AMMonday, November 2, 2015
American leaders usually don’t come under theatrical scrutiny until decades after they leave office. The first serious mainstream plays about Presidents Johnson (All the Way) and Nixon (Fr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:19AMFriday, October 30, 2015
Keira Knightley says she has been approached at least three times to play Thérèse Raquin in one or another adaptation of the 1867 Zola novel. She finally succumbed when offered Hel…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:26AMWednesday, October 28, 2015
If, like me, you enjoyed Annaleigh Ashford as the daffy romantic factory worker in Kinky Boots (for which she won a Clarence Derwent award) and loved her as the talentless balletomane in You…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:03AMMonday, October 26, 2015
Great plays are usually great in one of two ways. Either they are culminating examples of existing ideas, or groundbreaking examples of new things entirely. The Humans, by Stephen Karam, at …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:14AMThursday, October 22, 2015
Like the M34 bus, Michael John LaChiusa never disappoints for long: If you don’t enjoy one show, another will come by soon. At 53, he remains probably the most prolific of his cohort of th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:30AMWednesday, October 21, 2015
It has not been a good fall for elders onstage. A few weeks ago, the meddlesome 70ish character played by Marlo Thomas in Clever Little Lies nearly torpedoed her marriage while trying to sav…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:06AMThursday, October 15, 2015
It’s only fitting that Atlantic Records is releasing its recording of Hamilton in a variety of formats that, like the hit musical itself, rewind history. The download went on sale Septembe…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:25AMHarold Pinter wrote Old Times (which opens tonight at the Roundabout) in 1971, only eight years before Caryl Churchill wrote Cloud Nine (which opened last night at the Atlantic). Though both…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:52AMAs long as there have been wars, there have been dramatic stories about returning soldiers, wounded in body or spirit. From The Odyssey to Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot trilogy, with …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:52AMThe drug-addict mother, the fictional son, the defective airplane parts: Secrets are at the core of many great American plays. Sometimes they are secrets kept by one character from the other…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:50AMTheater composers seem to have a thing for “beloved” novels about ambitious girls, usually orphaned, making their way in an unwelcoming world. There’s a good reason for it, too: Such n…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:50AMMonday, October 12, 2015
The voice of Marlo Thomas, so cavernously amplified it sounds as if it’s coming from a secret vault at an undisclosed location outside of Marlo Thomas, expertly sets up a joke: “If you h…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:21PMMonday, October 5, 2015
The first American production of Cloud Nine opened off Broadway on May 18, 1981, a few weeks before the Times ran its first account of what would later be known as AIDS. That’s pure coinci…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:23PMMonday, September 28, 2015
The fall Broadway season unofficially begins tonight with the opening of Spring Awakening, the first of six revivals in a row. It’s not surprising that with so many déjà vus, and…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:49PMSunday, September 27, 2015
The Belgian director Ivo van Hove almost always has the term avant-garde attached to his name, but with four major New York productions this season, including two on Broadway, he probably ne…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, September 17, 2015
Most plays about religion are really about politics or psychopathology. In Saint Joan, Agnes of God, and Doubt, for instance, it’s not dogma that gets dramatized — how could it be? Theol…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM 
