Friday, 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 06:40AMThursday, November 12, 2015
British actors have a ritual — or at least Ian McKellen does, because I saw him do it once — of blessing a new stage by kissing it. (He then recited a Shakespearean monologue, but that p…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:57PMTuesday, November 10, 2015
When a play trains its basilisk gaze on a demographic you belong to, it may seem as if the playwright took notes inside your head. That’s how I felt, anyway, at Dada Woof Papa Hot, Peter P…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:21AMMonday, November 9, 2015
The home that Isaac returns to at the beginning of Taylor Mac’s smart but deliberately disorienting new play Hir is not the one he left when he enlisted as a Marine three years e…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:24AMFriday, November 6, 2015
I’m no fan of jukebox musicals. If they’re the type that tell an invented tale, like Mamma Mia! or Rock of Ages, the book is generally rendered idiotic by the effort to accommodate the s…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:15AMMonday, November 2, 2015
American leaders usually don’t come under theatrical scrutiny until decades after they leave office. The first serious mainstream plays about Presidents Johnson (All the Way) and Nixon (Fr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:19AMFriday, October 30, 2015
Keira Knightley says she has been approached at least three times to play Thérèse Raquin in one or another adaptation of the 1867 Zola novel. She finally succumbed when offered Hel…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:26AMWednesday, October 28, 2015
If, like me, you enjoyed Annaleigh Ashford as the daffy romantic factory worker in Kinky Boots (for which she won a Clarence Derwent award) and loved her as the talentless balletomane in You…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:03AMMonday, October 26, 2015
Great plays are usually great in one of two ways. Either they are culminating examples of existing ideas, or groundbreaking examples of new things entirely. The Humans, by Stephen Karam, at …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:14AMThursday, October 22, 2015
Like the M34 bus, Michael John LaChiusa never disappoints for long: If you don’t enjoy one show, another will come by soon. At 53, he remains probably the most prolific of his cohort of th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:30AMWednesday, October 21, 2015
It has not been a good fall for elders onstage. A few weeks ago, the meddlesome 70ish character played by Marlo Thomas in Clever Little Lies nearly torpedoed her marriage while trying to sav…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:06AMThursday, October 15, 2015
It’s only fitting that Atlantic Records is releasing its recording of Hamilton in a variety of formats that, like the hit musical itself, rewind history. The download went on sale Septembe…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:25AMHarold Pinter wrote Old Times (which opens tonight at the Roundabout) in 1971, only eight years before Caryl Churchill wrote Cloud Nine (which opened last night at the Atlantic). Though both…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:52AMAs long as there have been wars, there have been dramatic stories about returning soldiers, wounded in body or spirit. From The Odyssey to Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot trilogy, with …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:52AMThe drug-addict mother, the fictional son, the defective airplane parts: Secrets are at the core of many great American plays. Sometimes they are secrets kept by one character from the other…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:50AMTheater composers seem to have a thing for “beloved” novels about ambitious girls, usually orphaned, making their way in an unwelcoming world. There’s a good reason for it, too: Such n…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:50AMMonday, October 12, 2015
The voice of Marlo Thomas, so cavernously amplified it sounds as if it’s coming from a secret vault at an undisclosed location outside of Marlo Thomas, expertly sets up a joke: “If you h…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:21PMMonday, October 5, 2015
The first American production of Cloud Nine opened off Broadway on May 18, 1981, a few weeks before the Times ran its first account of what would later be known as AIDS. That’s pure coinci…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:23PMMonday, September 28, 2015
The fall Broadway season unofficially begins tonight with the opening of Spring Awakening, the first of six revivals in a row. It’s not surprising that with so many déjà vus, and…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:49PMSunday, September 27, 2015
The Belgian director Ivo van Hove almost always has the term avant-garde attached to his name, but with four major New York productions this season, including two on Broadway, he probably ne…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThursday, September 17, 2015
Most plays about religion are really about politics or psychopathology. In Saint Joan, Agnes of God, and Doubt, for instance, it’s not dogma that gets dramatized — how could it be? Theol…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, September 10, 2015
Richard Maxwell’s Isolde, opening the season at the Theatre for a New Audience, belongs to the Mad Libs school of dramaturgy, in which various more or less random elements are fitted toget…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, September 6, 2015
Art for art’s sake is sometimes a diet too rich to maintain, yet art that sets out single-mindedly to feed a political agenda almost always fails to satisfy. The Public Theater, whose miss…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:25PMThursday, August 27, 2015
If you fished Whorl Inside a Loop out of a slush pile and read only its précis, you’d probably cringe: A Broadway actress, described as the whitest person at her own Whitey …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, August 25, 2015
What used to be called the straw-hat circuit is long gone, as is the customary summer haberdashery that gave it its name. Stars no longer caravan their Broadway hits, in stripped-down versio…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:32AMWednesday, August 12, 2015
What interest could Annie Baker possibly have in kitsch? This was the question bothering me as I headed into her new play, John, which takes place in a Gettysburg bed and breakfast so encrus…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:38PMTuesday, August 11, 2015
In the Shakespeare canon, Cymbeline is a late play and a long play: by line count, the third longest, with 3,753. (The Comedy of Errors has less than half as many.) Some of those lines are g…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:53AMFriday, August 7, 2015
A typical musical might list 18 numbers in its program; Hamilton, with 34, is more in the range of operatic works like Porgy and Bess. Ambition is part of it, no less for Lin-Manuel Miranda …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:42AMFriday, July 24, 2015
Dave Malloy has a thing for the Russian romantics. His recent electropop opera Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 — presented in a big tent fabulously tricked out as a Czarist ni…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PMFriday, July 17, 2015
There’s a scene in Fun Home — both the book and the musical — in which a 9-year-old girl shows her father a fanciful map she’s drawn for school. As the father grows more ag…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:21AMThursday, July 16, 2015
Are you Team Lippa or Team LaChiusa? For theater types, the dueling musicals of The Wild Party — one by Andrew Lippa, one by Michael John LaChiusa, both somehow given their premieres in th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:35PM 
