Sunday, 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 08:42PMThursday, November 6, 2014
The story goes that the wife of the composer Jerome Kern and the wife of the librettist Oscar Hammerstein II were seated next to each other at a dinner party. An admirer of Show Boat, the tw…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:30PMMonday, November 3, 2014
One of the spring’s most enjoyable new comedies was Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss, a big wet smooch on the lips to theatrical narcissism. Raucous and ribald, it fit uncertainly in the tra…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:04PMThursday, October 30, 2014
The great vernacular revolution of the 1960s turned theatrical dialogue from a prancing pony into a workhorse. With realism ascendant, serious drama, and eventually comedy, demanded a perfec…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, October 28, 2014
Suzan-Lori Parks has a lot of nerve. A few years back she wrote and organized something she called 365 Days/365 Plays, which really was what its name suggested. Before that, in Topdog/Underd…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, October 26, 2014
One night at the Public Theater last September, Sting arrived onstage to perform some songs he had written for the upcoming musical The Last Ship. As the applause died down, an overenthusias…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:19PMThursday, October 23, 2014
It’s a good thing that the playwright Ayad Akhtar is Muslim, because if any non-Muslim wrote Disgraced — and you could almost imagine someone like Bruce Norris wanting to — the respons…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThere’s a moment three-quarters of the way through the first act of The Fortress of Solitude, a new musical based on the Jonathan Lethem novel, when all of the show’s developing threads …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00AMMonday, October 20, 2014
Plays about writing are bores or lies or both. The drama of the process, entirely internal and largely concerned with semicolons, can’t be staged, so a different drama has to be manufactur…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMFriday, October 17, 2014
Basil Twist has been famous for stretching the boundaries of puppetry at least since his 1998 water-tank ballet of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. For Twist, the aim of the boundary-stret…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:10PMThursday, October 16, 2014
On the Town is a heartbreakingly youthful work: both about youth and by youth. Watching its three sailors pursue a lifetime of adventure while on 24-hour shore leave in New York, New York, y…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, October 15, 2014
Slackers don’t usually get very far in musicals. From Oklahoma! to Gypsy and beyond, American-style can-do-ism is built into the form; it’s hard to mumble a showstopper. And yet here is …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00AMThursday, October 9, 2014
The playwright Terrence McNally, who turns 75 next month, is not only prolific but prolific in many genres. His catalog, spanning 51 years, includes Broadway comedies like The Ritz and drama…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, October 8, 2014
Funny thing about the avant-garde: Each new wave looks a lot like the last one. So it will come as no surprise to those who have seen a previous Robert Wilson work that his latest New York o…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:44PMSunday, October 5, 2014
If there’s any justice, the superb stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time will be as big a hit on Broadway this year as the original novel, by Mark Haddon, w…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, October 2, 2014
Nikos Psacharopoulos, the longtime head of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, enjoyed the opportunities frequently afforded him to brutalize students and staff. Moron! he would bark. Get off…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, October 1, 2014
Tail! Spin! describes itself as a political comedy, and though it features politicians and is often very funny, I’m not sure the phrase really applies. “Political comedy” suggests some…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMTuesday, September 30, 2014
If everything a great playwright wrote were top-drawer, the drawer probably wouldn’t open. That’s one reason the Roundabout’s fine mounting of Indian Ink — which is second-…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, September 28, 2014
Most contemporary stage comedies are aggressively joke-based. In effect, the playwright demands that theatergoers bend to the rhythm of his punch lines and cough up laughs on cue. It can be …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMMonday, September 22, 2014
You can’t accuse the Belgian director Ivo van Hove of picking fights with weaklings. His productions of Hedda Gabler, The Little Foxes, and A Streetcar Named Desire, all at New York Theate…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:16PMThursday, September 18, 2014
The older the money, the stingier the meal — or so goes a persistent Wasp stereotype. Onstage, too, the rich can be unforthcoming. A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, an epistolary play about su…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, September 10, 2014
George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, an Off Broadway hit in 1986, was groundbreaking in the way a gravedigger is. Amid brilliant satirical confetti it declared an end to a certain strain …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, September 4, 2014
The organizers of A.R. Gurney’s yearlong “residency” at the Signature Theatre Company did not lack for options to honor him, even with Love Letters already spoken for. (It opens on Bro…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, September 2, 2014
If you’ve ever seen Waiting for Godot, maybe you’ve been mystified by Lucky’s gibberish tirade halfway through Act One, an eight-minute speech that begins “Given the existence as utt…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:15PMSunday, August 10, 2014
Most contemporary plays, or at least the ones that make it to New York’s big stages, can be categorized as Realism Lite: recognizable people doing recognizable things, perhaps with a powde…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:54PMThursday, August 7, 2014
What hath Godot wrought? The pregnant, performative style of stage dialogue revolutionized by Beckett and honed by Pinter to express existential dread has, over the years, devolved into a ch…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:16PMTuesday, August 5, 2014
On a recent evening at the Delacorte in Central Park, a raccoon stopped by unticketed to watch a moment of the Public Theater’s new production of King Lear, starring John Lithgow. Followin…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:30PMFriday, August 1, 2014
Even on the rare occasions when they’re legible, the notes I take in the theater are generally useless — except in those cases where boredom causes them to mutate into to-do lists. I mak…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:05PMWednesday, July 30, 2014
If you were trying to devise a light comedy for overheated August audiences (and theaters closing out their subscription seasons) you might do worse than a two-hander with a clickbait title …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, July 21, 2014
Jersey Boys, which should have been a cautionary tale, has become instead a how-to guide. (Half a billion in Broadway receipts will do that.) It has not only spawned an infestation of jukebo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, July 17, 2014
Elaine Stritch wasn’t the star of Company, but she sure as hell made herself the star of its making-of documentary. Dean Jones and the rest of the actors be damned; the drama of her failur…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:32PM 
