Sunday, April 23, 2017
Pre-production publicity for Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, which opens tonight at the Signature, revealed only that it is “a play about people telling stories about telling stories.” Th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, April 20, 2017
The show curtain now in use at the Shubert Theatre, where the ecstatic revival of Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler opens tonight, may be the reddest red-red I’ve ever seen. The beaded g…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMWednesday, April 19, 2017
Lillian Hellman’s breakneck melodrama The Little Foxes was written in 1939 on the Depression plan. It has one set, no more characters than it can use, and just enough plot to make it go. Y…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, April 18, 2017
One of the reasons Shakespeare’s history plays are the greatest examples of their genre is that he took care to write about events no one could possibly remember. (They were set eons befor…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, April 13, 2017
Diplomacy is a lovely word, suggesting the idea that with tact and perseverance humans can accommodate one another. Yeah, sure. If that seems unlikely, so does the idea that diplomacy could …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, April 6, 2017
The last half-hour or so of War Paint, the beguiling but frustrating new musical about beauty legends Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, is just about everything you could want from a Br…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, April 5, 2017
Noël Coward described his 1939 romp Present Laughter as “a series of semiautobiographical pyrotechnics” — merely “semi,” presumably, because the main character, Garry Essendin…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, April 3, 2017
To my knowledge, Zeno’s paradox has never been recruited as a plot point and thematic touchstone in a Broadway musical before Amélie, the wistful new show starring Phillipa Soo that…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:06PMSunday, April 2, 2017
Farce is not an acquired taste; even babies laugh at pratfalls. Rather, farce is the taste you fail to grow out of — and thank God, because sometimes only the stupidest fun will do. If thi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:46PMFriday, March 31, 2017
There’s something about our time that doesn’t favor expressionism, especially in mainstream theater. The distortion of perspective and the inflation of emotional state that we may enjoy …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:13PMMonday, March 27, 2017
When a play’s title is Latin History for Morons, you may not want to be one of the title characters. Nevertheless, that’s what you are in John Leguizamo’s new stand-up-act-posing-as-a-…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:04PMA spring theater preview mostly means a spring Broadway preview, since April is the month in which many of the year’s biggest-ticket shows rush the end zone. (To be eligible for this seaso…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:36PMThursday, March 23, 2017
You probably already know whether you like Miss Saigon, the pop-opera retread of Madama Butterfly set against the collapse of the American experiment in Vietnam. If you do like it, by all me…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:01PMDon’t let the lovely silvery MGM draperies fool you, nor the silky gorgeousness of the orchestrations: The New Yorkers, the latest Encores! reclamation project, is a clumsy, instructive, d…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:26PMMonday, March 20, 2017
Typically, Sarah Ruhl’s plays sound like your smartest friend stoned. They unfurl in tendrils of dialogue that are both organic and perseverant, fantastic and philosophical. Because the pl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:03PMThursday, March 16, 2017
We are used to thinking of Arthur Miller as a restless moralist: an American superego salesman with a big territory to cover. But being a playwright, he is also of course a sensualist; his d…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:05PMWednesday, March 15, 2017
As you head to your seat for the new David Byrne musical Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, at the Public, you may smile upon seeing a painted stage drop bearing the legend “She was warned. She w…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMMonday, March 13, 2017
The Playwrights Realm enjoyed a major success last year with The Wolves, a marvelous, eye-opening play by Sarah DeLappe that flipped the tropes of the men-in-sports genre to explore the live…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:30PMThursday, March 9, 2017
Surely we have reached the point with Tennessee Williams’s great plays — if not, perhaps, his lesser ones — where it is desirable and even necessary to deploy them in new ways. They ar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:20PMThursday, March 2, 2017
What is Jordan Berman’s problem? He’s 28, adorkably gay, and gainfully employed at an advertising agency. His trio of college besties — Kiki, Vanessa, and Laura — coo over him like a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMWednesday, March 1, 2017
We do not question, despite their umpteen revivals, whether the theater “needs” another production of Othello or The Cherry Orchard or Waiting for Godot. Nor should we with Sweeney Todd,…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:11PMMonday, February 27, 2017
Again with the whining! It would take a review longer than this space permits to explore how David Mamet, the great bard of the grifty underclass in early plays like American Buffalo and Gle…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:25PMThursday, February 23, 2017
A 98-year-old woman named Marie sits in a wheelchair surveying the Georges Seurat painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMTuesday, February 21, 2017
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins — a MacArthur genius, a Pulitzer finalist, and a recipient of Yale’s Windham–Campbell Literature Prize — gets my award for most-restless playwright. Five of hi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, February 16, 2017
For at least 30 years, Wallace Shawn has been warning theatergoers about totalitarianism: how near it is, how easily we might acquiesce in it. I have to admit I’ve sometimes found his alar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:47PMThursday, February 9, 2017
It’s easy to see why Stephen Sondheim and the team of Kander and Ebb each took a stab at musicalizing Sunset Boulevard. The still-startling 1950 movie, directed and co-written by Billy Wil…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:47PMIt might be possible to enjoy the musical Big River by squinting. It is, after all, based on Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, whose main events — Huck’s escape from his…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:50PMThursday, January 19, 2017
August Wilson was still a young artist, if no longer a young man, when he started work on Jitney at age 34. Was the play, about some car-service drivers scratching out a living, meant as a o…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:17PMWednesday, January 18, 2017
On October 20, 1981, six members of an organization called the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brink’s armored truck at the Nanuet Mall, killing a Brink’s guard and then two policemen who…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:48PMSunday, January 15, 2017
In a dank and grimy cottage in a small town in remote Connemara live the embittered fortyish spinster Maureen Folan and her spiteful mother, Mag, whose name rhymes with “hag” for good re…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:27PMThursday, January 5, 2017
Barring last-minute announcements — unlikely because every available theater is booked — 24 productions are scheduled to open on Broadway between now and the Tony Awards cutoff at the en…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:42PM 
