Thursday, 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 04:42PMFriday, December 16, 2016
Nine high-school girls on a soccer team somewhere in suburbia yack and confide and bluster and gossip, all at once, about everything from the Khmer Rouge to the relative merits of pads versu…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:15PMMonday, December 12, 2016
As befits its all-or-nothing love story, Othello is Shakespeare’s most intense play, in part because it eschews his usual ADHD dramaturgy. The tragedy of the Moorish general who becomes a …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:32PMSunday, December 11, 2016
Maybe an a cappella stage musical could make sense: The sound of unaccompanied voices in tight harmony can be compelling, and the genre has proved successful in the Pitch Perfect movies. A b…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:30PMThursday, December 8, 2016
It hasn’t been a great year for new musicals; only one — Dear Evan Hansen — made my list of the top ten theatrical productions of 2016. Several others were great in part: the design of…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThe nearly perfect 2002 stage musical Hairspray is so hardy you don’t notice how carefully it’s crafted. The score, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, is of course part of that, bringing…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:20PMWednesday, December 7, 2016
In 2010, two years before she became famous as the author of Wild, Cheryl Strayed took over writing the “Dear Sugar” advice column from a friend. She had none of the skills that traditio…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, December 4, 2016
The big problem in writing great musicals is not the difficulty of writing great songs. The big problem is that the songs, great or not, are cannibals, picking the stories clean and leaving …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, December 1, 2016
There’s a good reason Broadway musicals traditionally leave the gangsters backstage. Except when handled with the greatest skill — as in, say, Guys and Dolls — stories that include mob…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, November 30, 2016
It’s not impossible to find the right tone for a musical comedy about a gruesome subject: Look at Little Shop of Horrors, which both satirizes and honors the implications of its bloodthirs…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, November 28, 2016
“You are no Larry Kramer,” the Academic shouts at his boyfriend, the Writer, a hothead on a tear about homophobic violence. “This isn’t Boys in the Band,” the Writer later sn…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:43PMMonday, November 21, 2016
When asked in a recent interview what inspired him to write This Day Forward, the playwright Nicky Silver immediately answered, “other writers’ successes.” If only any line of the play…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMI met Andy at a party in 1995. Soon afterward, he phoned the host, a mutual friend, to get my number so he could invite me to a play. As it happened, the mutual friend, hearing the descripti…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:18PMSunday, November 20, 2016
Probably the strangest and least revivable Broadway genre is the midcentury hooker musical comedy. Shows like Irma La Douce (first produced in 1956), New Girl in Town (1957), and House of Fl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:00PMThursday, November 17, 2016
Though he has no prior professional theater credits, Jason Sudeikis holds the stage with confidence and verve as the inspiring prep school teacher John Keating in the adaptation of Dead Poet…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:15PMTuesday, November 15, 2016
Sometimes, with a good-enough playwright, it’s good to have no idea what’s going on. That was the case for me with Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entir…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, November 14, 2016
How can it be that a show based on the most serious novel of all time is both the most gorgeous new musical in town and, for much of its length, the silliest? That may be a self-answering qu…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMWednesday, November 9, 2016
After the opening-night audience at Women of a Certain Age gave the cast a well-deserved standing ovation and started to file out of the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall, ushers could be hea…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:47PMMonday, November 7, 2016
Hally is a whiny, pretentious, self-involved, 17-year-old nerd. Sam and Willie are dignified workingmen in their mid-40s. Nevertheless, Hally is “Master Harold” and Sam and Willie are th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, November 3, 2016
Lynn Nottage’s gripping but disappointing new play Sweat, which opens tonight at the Public, arrives in New York from its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival trailing hosanna…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, November 2, 2016
“I always talk in stories; they really illustrate points,” says Michael Tubbs, a councilman running for mayor of Stockton, California. Actually, it’s Anna Deavere Smith who speaks thes…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:16PMSunday, October 30, 2016
Classically trained actors are naturally drawn to roles that show off their verbal fluency, but few contemporary plays give them the chance. No wonder Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Da…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:05PMThursday, October 27, 2016
The heartbreaking revival of the William Finn–James Lapine musical Falsettos that opens tonight on Broadway comes, by chance, just a day after scientists reported in Nature that the longst…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, October 20, 2016
Trying to avoid the third presidential debate, I decided to watch a press screener of Fox TV’s version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show last night, thinking camp would be the perfect antid…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:53PMTuesday, October 18, 2016
It’s probably not a coincidence that three of today’s best multi-character monologists — to coin a paradoxical job title — are women of color: Anna Deavere Smith, Nilaja Sun, and Sar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, October 16, 2016
Part of what keeps great plays great, age after age, is that they have so much in them: so much psychology, amusement, conflict, philosophy, politics, emotion, and linguistic pleasure. What …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:41PMThursday, October 13, 2016
Perhaps it’s the uncertainty principle at work, but one of last year’s best dramas has somehow become one of this year’s best comedies. I’m referring to Manhattan Theatre Club’s pr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, October 10, 2016
When Broadway isn’t busy being a temple of high art, it’s more of a transient hotel, with the oddest characters showing up for short stays. The Lyceum seems to attract a lot of these mar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMThursday, October 6, 2016
In 1914, Irving Berlin, already world-famous for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” became a charter member of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Arrangers and Publishers. Until then, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMSaturday, October 1, 2016
In early 1987, the director Peter Brook and the BAM impresario Harvey Lichtenstein climbed a ladder and popped through a window of the derelict Majestic Theater on Fulton Street in Fort Gree…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:46PMThursday, September 29, 2016
In 1969, a National Geographic photographer named Loren McIntyre made what was supposed to be a three-day expedition to Brazil’s Javari Valley in search of the Mayouruna, an indigenous, it…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM 
