Monday, 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 09:15PMWednesday, February 18, 2015
In a funny-awkward meeting that takes place near the beginning Verité, a pair of Norwegian publishers tells Jo Darum, our heroine, that she has a captivating authorial voice but the wro…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, February 17, 2015
I don’t mean to suggest that you’re unpatriotic if you aren’t moved by Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sensational new hip-hop biomusical at the Public. But in order to dislike it you…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMFriday, February 13, 2015
People who love stage musicals have learned to dread their movie adaptations; infidelity leading to disaster is pretty much in the contract. So those of us who treasure The Last Five Years, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:50PMThursday, February 12, 2015
Though The Iceman Cometh is generally considered one of Eugene O’Neill’s greatest plays, it did not win (as four of his others did) the Pulitzer Prize; the Pulitzer is not, after all, aw…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMSunday, February 8, 2015
The Civilians call the work they do “investigative theater,” which sounds very high-minded; their name, too, suggests engagement in the real life of society as opposed to the artificial …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, February 5, 2015
Sometimes — and I mean this in a good way — the Encores! series at City Center seems like the musical equivalent of A Night at the Museum, making the dinosaurs dance. That’s certainly …
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:28PMMonday, February 2, 2015
A brief pause in the drumbeat of new openings left me time last week to catch up with two Off Broadway plays I’d missed earlier in January. Both had gotten mixed reviews — not just varie…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:04PMThursday, January 29, 2015
It’s said that Chekhov was always trying to get the Moscow Art Theater to produce Ivan Turgenev’s neglected classic A Month in the Country instead of his own new plays. Was this homage, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:00PMSunday, January 25, 2015
The frequent collaborators John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett seem to be everywhere these days, not just geographically but narratively. Whether the tale they’re telling is psychological (as …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:34PMThursday, January 22, 2015
By the standards of the Golden Age, when musicals with a cast of 60 and an orchestra of 40 were common, Into the Woods is not a huge show. Its 1987 Broadway premiere featured just 19 actors …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMSunday, January 18, 2015
Like “humanistic Judaism,” the term “imaginative theater” ought to be a redundancy. (Shouldn’t all theater be imaginative?) Still, some troupes seek to differentiate themselves fro…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:27PMThursday, January 15, 2015
The new musical Honeymoon in Vegas is a throwback, and not just because it’s based on a 1992 movie that was, even then, somewhat retrograde in its humor. Cancel the “somewhat”: The plo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, January 13, 2015
Would you like to see a two-hander in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a hunky but bashful British beekeeper, hemming and half-smiling, while Ruth Wilson, so recently embaubled with a Golden Glob…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:35PMThursday, January 8, 2015
The Suicide, Nikolai Erdman’s biting 1928 satire of Soviet thought control, so overflows with ironies that they seem to slosh into real life. To begin with, the play died by its own hand: …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, December 21, 2014
It would not ordinarily be newsworthy that a performer named Gordon Sumner took over a secondary role in a struggling Broadway musical. You do not hear much about cast changes at On the…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, December 16, 2014
A famous agent used to instruct clients never to set a scene in a bus: Americans don’t mind stories that are sad, he said, but they draw the line at downmarket depressing. Apparently Samue…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:25AMSunday, December 14, 2014
Aside from “Frank Wildhorn,” the two words I least want to hear in conjunction with a show I’m about to attend are “audience participation.” The prospect of being dragooned into aw…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:23PMTuesday, December 9, 2014
This week, Vulture will be publishing our critics' year-end lists. Enjoy. 1. Audra McDonald in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & GrillBroadwayNot many New York productions this year wer…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:50PMMonday, December 8, 2014
When you enter the East 4th Street home of New York Theatre Workshop, you can never be sure what you’re going to find. The blank-slate interior has been turned into an amphitheater for Car…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, December 7, 2014
As Peter Pan is traditionally portrayed by a gamine actress, and Hairspray’s Edna Turnblad by a chunky actor, theatrical tradition dictates that John Merrick, the grotesquely deformed titl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, December 4, 2014
Some 17 Sally Bowleses painted their nails green and sang “Maybe This Time” for the Sam Mendes revisal of Cabaret that ran on Broadway from March 1998 (Natasha Richardson) through Januar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, November 24, 2014
A Cornish knight, an Irish princess, and the king they both betray by falling in love: For centuries the tale circulated Europe in various forms. But after Wagner’s monumental Tristan und …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, November 20, 2014
To begin with, A Delicate Balance is a masterpiece. I’m not sure that anything in Edward Albee’s daunting catalog — some 30 plays — surpasses it. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMIf Mike Nichols ever produced anything as banal as a résumé, it would have looked highly suspicious, the humblebrag of a con man. He did too many things, they were too far-flung, a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:45PMWednesday, November 19, 2014
With all the larks praying and bird-pairs bursting in song, it’s sometimes hard to hear the real voice of Oscar Hammerstein in his lyrics. But his “poetic,” not to say ornithological, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:15PMMonday, November 17, 2014
Despite what seemed like weeks of buzz about its radical transformations, the revival of Side Show that opened on Broadway tonight is not as meaningfully different from the 1997 or…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:45PMIn 2003, when she was not yet 30, Young Jean Lee founded a theater company for the purpose of producing her own work. Call it savvy or call it hubris, the move was bold, especially for an ar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, November 16, 2014
What with The Last Ship, Disgraced, and seminude Bradley Cooper all on the boards this fall, Broadway is more testosterony than usual, full of scruff and blowtorches, beefcake and wife-beati…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMTuesday, November 11, 2014
It’s surprising how much you can remove from a play and still have a play — hell, Beckett lets a pair of disembodied lips yak at you for 15 minutes and it’s riveting theater. But David…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, November 9, 2014
The Band Wagon has been a lot of things. First it was a groundbreaking musical revue, with sketches by George S. Kaufman and songs by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, including the classic …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:42PM 
