Thursday, 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 10:00PMThursday, September 10, 2015
Richard Maxwell’s Isolde, opening the season at the Theatre for a New Audience, belongs to the Mad Libs school of dramaturgy, in which various more or less random elements are fitted toget…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, September 6, 2015
Art for art’s sake is sometimes a diet too rich to maintain, yet art that sets out single-mindedly to feed a political agenda almost always fails to satisfy. The Public Theater, whose miss…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:25PMThursday, August 27, 2015
If you fished Whorl Inside a Loop out of a slush pile and read only its précis, you’d probably cringe: A Broadway actress, described as the whitest person at her own Whitey …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, August 25, 2015
What used to be called the straw-hat circuit is long gone, as is the customary summer haberdashery that gave it its name. Stars no longer caravan their Broadway hits, in stripped-down versio…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:32AMWednesday, August 12, 2015
What interest could Annie Baker possibly have in kitsch? This was the question bothering me as I headed into her new play, John, which takes place in a Gettysburg bed and breakfast so encrus…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:38PMTuesday, August 11, 2015
In the Shakespeare canon, Cymbeline is a late play and a long play: by line count, the third longest, with 3,753. (The Comedy of Errors has less than half as many.) Some of those lines are g…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:53AMFriday, August 7, 2015
A typical musical might list 18 numbers in its program; Hamilton, with 34, is more in the range of operatic works like Porgy and Bess. Ambition is part of it, no less for Lin-Manuel Miranda …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:42AMFriday, July 24, 2015
Dave Malloy has a thing for the Russian romantics. His recent electropop opera Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 — presented in a big tent fabulously tricked out as a Czarist ni…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PMFriday, July 17, 2015
There’s a scene in Fun Home — both the book and the musical — in which a 9-year-old girl shows her father a fanciful map she’s drawn for school. As the father grows more ag…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:21AMThursday, July 16, 2015
Are you Team Lippa or Team LaChiusa? For theater types, the dueling musicals of The Wild Party — one by Andrew Lippa, one by Michael John LaChiusa, both somehow given their premieres in th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:35PMMonday, July 13, 2015
You used to have to enter the Marquis Theatre, that abattoir of an auditorium inside the Marriott Marquis hotel, via a series of Plexiglas-encased escalators and cattle chutes that primed yo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:11AMThursday, July 2, 2015
The mood was ecstatic last night for the first of three concert performances of Little Shop of Horrors, the nearly perfect 1982 musical that’s the centerpiece of this summer’s “Encores…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:08PMTuesday, June 30, 2015
Douglas Carter Beane sure knows how to write for his stars. In 1997, As Bees in Honey Drown perfectly showcased the talents of J. Smith-Cameron, just as, more recently, The Little Dog Laughe…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:46PMFriday, June 26, 2015
A New Brain, the killer musical about a songwriter facing a life-threatening brain condition, could only have been written by William Finn. For one thing, it’s highly autobiographical. Whe…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:40AMFriday, June 19, 2015
The only previous work the young playwright Joshua Harmon mentions in his current program bio is Bad Jews, a big hit for the Roundabout in 2012 and 2013. That terrific comedy, tight and…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:55PMThursday, June 18, 2015
“There are aspects of the play we kindly ask you not to reveal in your review of Gloria.” So read the email from the press agents for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s new shocker at the Vineya…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:12PMWednesday, June 17, 2015
The weather, that diva, is often a co-star at the Delacorte Theater, but rarely so aptly as at a recent preview performance of The Tempest, when the air seemed pregnant and thunderstorms wer…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:37PMMonday, June 15, 2015
Before a word is spoken in Bruce Norris’s new play The Qualms, now at Playwrights Horizons, audiences hear the sound of nervous laughter onstage. It might as well have been my own, be…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:10AMThursday, June 11, 2015
At some point in their writing lives, most playwrights turn from the world they can never finally fathom to one they already know too well. Recent New York seasons have brought us both fond …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:46AMMonday, June 8, 2015
Time moves slowly in Tonyland; from one year to the next you can pretty much expect the same turnout of stars, the same proportion of gold to cheese. In that regard, the 2015 edition did not…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:51PMFriday, June 5, 2015
The 51 Tony Award nominators typically get a lot of grief from theater types, but they did a good job this Broadway season. Sure, I would have enjoyed seeing Jason Robert Brown’s score for…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:34PMThursday, June 4, 2015
With a title like Heisenberg, and a plot that begins with a smooch between an old man and a much younger woman, Simon Stephens’s terrific new play might seem to be a cross between Nick Pay…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:38AMWednesday, June 3, 2015
His first line is “Namaste, motherfuckers,” and the fact that he says it as a kind of greeting to his Nepalese roommate and the roommate’s Indian-American girlfriend does not make him …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:38AMMonday, June 1, 2015
You might not think that a man whose crimes against humanity during South Africa’s apartheid regime had earned him the nickname “Prime Evil” would want to be interviewed, in the prison…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:13AMFriday, May 29, 2015
For all its celebration of personal liberty and countercultural fabulousness, Broadway is actually a fairly God-positive place. Producers are not, after all, in the business of alienating po…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:37AMMonday, May 25, 2015
Pee-wee Herman comes to Broadway, and Paul Reubens moves (cautiously) back into the spotlight.
SOURCE: New York Magazine at 05:58PMTony Kushner is one of the last public intellectuals left standing in the theater—or America. Heavy is the head that wears that crown.
SOURCE: New York Magazine at 05:58PMThis week, the world will finally get its first look at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. But the most expensive musical in Broadway history has already had an epic run—battling bankruptc…
SOURCE: New York Magazine at 05:58PMSunday, May 24, 2015
From the outside, the “theater” looks like a shipping crate, the kind roadies roll around, except that it’s customized with various lights and bump-outs and a door that says AUDIENCE. …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:22PMWednesday, May 20, 2015
After attending a preview of Robert Askins’s new play Permission the other night, I can report that the cast’s padded undergarments, which got their own feature in the Times last week, a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PM 
