Wednesday, 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 09:00PMTuesday, May 19, 2015
In a Pottery Barned New York apartment, a postcoital couple awakens in the wee hours and stumbles through a discussion about their future. Have we not seen this before? Doug (an unrecognizab…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:23PMMonday, May 18, 2015
Note: Sam Gold's production of Annie Baker's play The Flick, produced at Playwrights Horizons in 2013 and subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize, returns tonight at the Barrow Street Theate…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, May 17, 2015
A playwright is really asking for it when he creates, in a semiautobiographical work, a conflict whose glorious resolution is the writing of the play itself. This is what A.R. Gurney has don…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, May 11, 2015
On a farm in South Africa, a large boulder stares down a local painter like a blank canvas. The painter — someone we would categorize today as an outsider artist — is Nukain Mabusa, an o…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, May 7, 2015
Should a critic recuse himself from reviewing a show because he loves it too much? I grew up wearing down the grooves of the 1968 cast album of the original Broadway production of Zorba, whi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:24PMSunday, April 26, 2015
The question of how to make Americans listen to things they may not want to hear, especially from the stage, is smartly answered by the Public Theater’s production of George Brant’s Grou…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, April 23, 2015
Sixteen-year-old Zoe has come to New Orleans with her mother’s boyfriend, Greg, to visit the Hummingbird Motel. When Greg lived there, before he cleaned up his image and moved to Atlanta, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, April 22, 2015
Whatever their nominal subjects, musical comedies today are usually about musical comedies. Consider three of the funniest of the last ten years: Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone, and The Book…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:46PMTuesday, April 21, 2015
Can we please get this straight, Broadway? Sprawling European novels do not make great musicals. Sorry, Les Miz partisans and Phantomaniacs, but whatever the virtues of those shows — and t…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, April 20, 2015
It’s not fair to judge a play by its bloopers; almost everything that has ever appeared onstage has had its share of dropped lines, missed entrances, Parkinsonian sets, or plummeting Spide…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, April 19, 2015
I already thought that Fun Home was the best new musical of the year in 2013, when it opened at the Public Theater. It’s hard to imagine that its Broadway transfer, and transformation, wil…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, April 16, 2015
There really was a King and there really was an I. The King was Phra Bat Somdet Phra Poramenthra Maha Mongkut Phra Chom Klao Chao Yu Hua, more generally known as Mongkut. The “I” was Ann…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, April 15, 2015
Provenance is a concept usually associated with art, not theater. Who, after all, owns a plot — or the history on which it is based? Still, the problem rears up in several ways in Finding …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMTuesday, April 14, 2015
With its title reminiscent of that very old standard “It Had to Be You,” the new musical It Shoulda Been You sounds like a retread even before it starts. The impression does not abate on…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, April 12, 2015
The curtain is already up at the Palace as you make your way to your seats for An American In Paris; the stage is empty except for a piano dead center. There’s no overture, and, when the s…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, April 9, 2015
With more than 1,500 seats, the Winter Garden is generally considered too large for plays: too lacking in intimacy and too hard to fill. In any case, it hasn’t housed a nonmusical since 19…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMWednesday, April 8, 2015
What kingdoms were to Elizabethan drama, co-ops are today. In contemporary plays as diverse as Skylight, Belleville, and Between Riverside and Crazy, domestic real estate is not just a setti…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMA note in the Playbill for the new production of Gigi explains that the title character “first burst upon the world” in a novella by “French authoress” Colette. Authoress? It says ev…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, April 7, 2015
For centuries, theatrical antiheroes have vied for attention by going to extremes, but Tyrone, in Robert Askins’s Hand to God, may be the first, onstage at least, to bite off an ear. He’…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMThursday, April 2, 2015
It may not at first make sense that two such fundamentally different acting styles as Bill Nighy’s and Carey Mulligan’s should coexist in — and mutually enhance — one play. And yet h…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMFriday, March 27, 2015
The largest Broadway houses have fewer than 2,000 seats; Radio City Music Hall has almost 6,000. So you might expect Radio City’s New York Spring Spectacular, a sticky amalgam of musical t…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:17PMThursday, March 19, 2015
You cannot look at Heidi Holland, the heroine of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, without seeing, dimly and slightly out of phase behind her, Wasserstein herself. It’s not just …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMThe ick factor is high in Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon, the second of this season’s three Encores! presentations. I’m referring to the story, a mortifying one even by the standa…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:16PMMonday, March 16, 2015
The flat lives and flatter affects of the below-40 set have been the subject of enough recent plays to warrant a collective name; how about Theater of the Becalmed? These are generally sour …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:43PMSunday, March 15, 2015
There are a million big reasons that On the Twentieth Century, the 1978 musical by Cy Coleman and Comden and Green, shouldn’t work today: It’s profoundly silly, tonally tricky, too big f…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:56PMFriday, March 13, 2015
There are few plays I disliked last year as much as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, the story of a nasty white Arkansas family discovering in the ancestral plantation a collection of…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:18AMTuesday, March 10, 2015
Peggy Lee and Lena Horne lived long enough to star in their own bio-musicals; Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, and Dinah Washington became theatrical subjects only after their deaths. Either wa…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:04PMSunday, March 8, 2015
Seldom do costumes provide the bulk of a play’s drama, but in Peter Morgan’s The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, the greatest surprises and transformations are all…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PMThursday, March 5, 2015
In the first episode of season five of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the character of Larry David, played by Larry David, is reduced to the cosmic indignity of buying tickets for High Holiday servic…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, March 2, 2015
A new play that reads very well on the page risks getting staged above its station. Sad to say, The Mystery of Love & Sex, by Bathsheba Doran, is that kind: engrossing in theory, a botch…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:15PM 
