Monday, February 22, 2016
When Mark Rylance accepted the 2008 Tony award for his performance in the French farce Boeing-Boeing, and when he accepted again in 2011 for his performance in the English drama Jerusalem, h…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:45PMFriday, February 19, 2016
The entire action of Stephen Karam’s play The Humans takes place in the Chinatown apartment that 26-year-old Brigid Blake has just moved into with her boyfriend, Richard Saad. It’s a dup…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:49AMThursday, February 18, 2016
Sam Shepard had already been writing for the theater for 14 years when Buried Child won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. The play—his 23rd or so, depending on how you count—was both a distill…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:20AMFriday, February 12, 2016
Four Harvard graduates walk into a scene: Valerie, a young African-American actor; Jackson, an African-American surgical intern; Ginny, a Chinese-Japanese-American psychology professor; and …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:29AMThursday, February 11, 2016
One of the many useful and fascinating things the Encores! series has done over the years — last night’s opening of Cabin in the Sky marks the start of its 23rd season — is to highligh…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:02PMA playwright enters dangerous territory when he attempts to dramatize his struggle to become an artist: a struggle that is supposedly resolved, or at least justified, by the artistry he now …
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:25AMTuesday, February 9, 2016
My Kindle tells me that it takes an average reader some ten hours to get through Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The delightful Bedlam stage version, which had a successful run in 201…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:10AMTuesday, February 2, 2016
If theater is a hot medium, musical theater burns, making it a particularly bad match for the coolness of television. The three recent live musicals on NBC (The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, Th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:53PMFriday, January 29, 2016
Stephen Karam’s Chinatown apartment, which he moved into after the success of his 2011 play Sons of the Prophet, is a huge step up from his last place. Yes, the elevator is tetchy, and the…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:40PMThursday, January 28, 2016
Every year, American Theatre magazine publishes a list of the country’s most-produced playwrights. It makes sense that Ayad Akhtar topped the latest edition: His award-winning plays, many …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:53AMThursday, January 21, 2016
Anna Cantor, the title character of Our Mother’s Brief Affair, is a suburban matron, a passive-aggressive parent, and, even in the throes of semi-dementia, a genius with a barb. (As long a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:44PMWednesday, January 20, 2016
Will we ever stop arguing about Mother Courage and Her Children? From the time Brecht wrote it, in 1939, as Fascism was approaching its orgasm in Europe, until three weeks ago, when Tonya Pi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:48PMThursday, January 14, 2016
The key thing about farce isn’t the slamming of doors but the solidity of walls; without rigid order there can be no liberating chaos. The carpentry is crucial, and I doubt there’s ever …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:33PMMonday, January 11, 2016
When Hamilton opened Off Broadway at the Public Theater last February, and then transferred to Broadway in August, many of the reviews, including mine, used words like historic, groundbreaki…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:56PMSunday, December 20, 2015
It’s hard enough to revive a musical that didn’t work the first time; that’s why John Doyle’s new version of The Color Purple is rightfully such a sensation. But it may be an even ha…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMSaturday, December 19, 2015
There are several ways to define a Broadway theater, all tautological. It’s a theater that uses a Broadway contract. It’s a theater in the Broadway district — Sixth Avenue to Eighth Av…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:21PMWednesday, December 16, 2015
Whether you will like These Paper Bullets! — the new Bard–on–Carnaby Street confection at the Atlantic — will probably depend on how much you like Much Ado About Nothing. Depend inve…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:54AMFriday, December 11, 2015
How can deprivation become joy? That’s not only the animating question of The Color Purple, the 1982 Alice Walker novel made into a musical in 2005, but also the operating principle behind…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:18AMWednesday, December 9, 2015
This week Vulture will be publishing our critics’ year-end lists. Monday we ran TV and movies. Tuesday covered albums, songs, and books. Today, look for theater, art, and classical perform…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:30AMTuesday, December 8, 2015
Here’s a sampling of things you’ll experience at Lazarus, the illustrated concept album disguised as a musical now playing at New York Theatre Workshop: one alien, two serial killers, th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:53AMMonday, December 7, 2015
A disreputable charmer brings the joy of music to a staid community while stirring up romance with an uptight lady: If the plot of School of Rock sounds like a great musical, that’s becaus…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:14PMFriday, December 4, 2015
Only in a weak Broadway field could The Wiz have won seven Tony awards, as it did in 1975. Its competition included Mack & Mabel, Shenandoah, and The Lieutenant (which ran for two weeks)…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:40PMThe opening number of Gigantic, a new musical set at a summer camp for hefty teens, is actually called “The Weight Is Over.” That’s about the high tide of wit in this chore of a show, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:40PMAl Pacino is not an actor of much breadth but he stakes a narrow territory deeply, and that can be brilliant to watch onstage. China Doll, his shaky new Broadway vehicle, by David Mamet, off…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:40PMThursday, December 3, 2015
There is no such thing as a wholly true play. The nature of the theater distorts reality, finding all sorts of holes in the historical record and inexorably filling them in. (Actors have to …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:28AMSunday, November 29, 2015
Just before the final preview of New York Animals last night, Eric Tucker, the show’s director, warned the audience that the “glamorous and exacting” play about to begin was still bein…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:45PMTuesday, November 24, 2015
“Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” said George S. Kaufman, but that was 90 years ago. Today most satire closes — that is, shuts down internally — before it ever hits the stag…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:12AMThursday, November 19, 2015
How many Steves does it take to screw up a marriage? Steven and Stephen are a long-term couple with an 8-year-old son and intimacy issues. Steven’s old friend Matt, and Matt’s partner, B…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:39AMMonday, November 16, 2015
The meta-drama of Arthur Miller’s plays, much in evidence during this, his centenary year, is the conflict between his moral energy and the theatrical formats in which he (sometimes only b…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00AMSunday, November 15, 2015
It’s an odd paradox that as Broadway fare grows more generic, genre pieces flail. Suspense is especially moribund; A Time to Kill tanked in 2013, and it may be that the last really success…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PMFriday, November 13, 2015
Critics, if not theatergoers, often bemoan the tide of revivals flooding Broadway each fall. This season, the ratio of old plays to new is about two to one. But why should revivals be consid…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:40AM 
