Thursday, 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 10:35PMMonday, July 13, 2015
You used to have to enter the Marquis Theatre, that abattoir of an auditorium inside the Marriott Marquis hotel, via a series of Plexiglas-encased escalators and cattle chutes that primed yo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:11AMThursday, July 2, 2015
The mood was ecstatic last night for the first of three concert performances of Little Shop of Horrors, the nearly perfect 1982 musical that’s the centerpiece of this summer’s “Encores…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:08PMTuesday, June 30, 2015
Douglas Carter Beane sure knows how to write for his stars. In 1997, As Bees in Honey Drown perfectly showcased the talents of J. Smith-Cameron, just as, more recently, The Little Dog Laughe…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:46PMFriday, June 26, 2015
A New Brain, the killer musical about a songwriter facing a life-threatening brain condition, could only have been written by William Finn. For one thing, it’s highly autobiographical. Whe…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:40AMFriday, June 19, 2015
The only previous work the young playwright Joshua Harmon mentions in his current program bio is Bad Jews, a big hit for the Roundabout in 2012 and 2013. That terrific comedy, tight and…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:55PMThursday, June 18, 2015
“There are aspects of the play we kindly ask you not to reveal in your review of Gloria.” So read the email from the press agents for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s new shocker at the Vineya…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:12PMWednesday, June 17, 2015
The weather, that diva, is often a co-star at the Delacorte Theater, but rarely so aptly as at a recent preview performance of The Tempest, when the air seemed pregnant and thunderstorms wer…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:37PMMonday, June 15, 2015
Before a word is spoken in Bruce Norris’s new play The Qualms, now at Playwrights Horizons, audiences hear the sound of nervous laughter onstage. It might as well have been my own, be…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:10AMThursday, June 11, 2015
At some point in their writing lives, most playwrights turn from the world they can never finally fathom to one they already know too well. Recent New York seasons have brought us both fond …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:46AMMonday, June 8, 2015
Time moves slowly in Tonyland; from one year to the next you can pretty much expect the same turnout of stars, the same proportion of gold to cheese. In that regard, the 2015 edition did not…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:51PMFriday, June 5, 2015
The 51 Tony Award nominators typically get a lot of grief from theater types, but they did a good job this Broadway season. Sure, I would have enjoyed seeing Jason Robert Brown’s score for…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:34PMThursday, June 4, 2015
With a title like Heisenberg, and a plot that begins with a smooch between an old man and a much younger woman, Simon Stephens’s terrific new play might seem to be a cross between Nick Pay…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:38AMWednesday, June 3, 2015
His first line is “Namaste, motherfuckers,” and the fact that he says it as a kind of greeting to his Nepalese roommate and the roommate’s Indian-American girlfriend does not make him …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:38AMMonday, June 1, 2015
You might not think that a man whose crimes against humanity during South Africa’s apartheid regime had earned him the nickname “Prime Evil” would want to be interviewed, in the prison…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:13AMFriday, May 29, 2015
For all its celebration of personal liberty and countercultural fabulousness, Broadway is actually a fairly God-positive place. Producers are not, after all, in the business of alienating po…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:37AMMonday, May 25, 2015
Pee-wee Herman comes to Broadway, and Paul Reubens moves (cautiously) back into the spotlight.
SOURCE: New York Magazine at 05:58PMTony Kushner is one of the last public intellectuals left standing in the theater—or America. Heavy is the head that wears that crown.
SOURCE: New York Magazine at 05:58PMThis week, the world will finally get its first look at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. But the most expensive musical in Broadway history has already had an epic run—battling bankruptc…
SOURCE: New York Magazine at 05:58PMSunday, May 24, 2015
From the outside, the “theater” looks like a shipping crate, the kind roadies roll around, except that it’s customized with various lights and bump-outs and a door that says AUDIENCE. …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:22PMWednesday, May 20, 2015
After attending a preview of Robert Askins’s new play Permission the other night, I can report that the cast’s padded undergarments, which got their own feature in the Times last week, a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMTuesday, May 19, 2015
In a Pottery Barned New York apartment, a postcoital couple awakens in the wee hours and stumbles through a discussion about their future. Have we not seen this before? Doug (an unrecognizab…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:23PMMonday, May 18, 2015
Note: Sam Gold's production of Annie Baker's play The Flick, produced at Playwrights Horizons in 2013 and subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize, returns tonight at the Barrow Street Theate…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, May 17, 2015
A playwright is really asking for it when he creates, in a semiautobiographical work, a conflict whose glorious resolution is the writing of the play itself. This is what A.R. Gurney has don…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, May 11, 2015
On a farm in South Africa, a large boulder stares down a local painter like a blank canvas. The painter — someone we would categorize today as an outsider artist — is Nukain Mabusa, an o…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, May 7, 2015
Should a critic recuse himself from reviewing a show because he loves it too much? I grew up wearing down the grooves of the 1968 cast album of the original Broadway production of Zorba, whi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:24PMSunday, April 26, 2015
The question of how to make Americans listen to things they may not want to hear, especially from the stage, is smartly answered by the Public Theater’s production of George Brant’s Grou…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, April 23, 2015
Sixteen-year-old Zoe has come to New Orleans with her mother’s boyfriend, Greg, to visit the Hummingbird Motel. When Greg lived there, before he cleaned up his image and moved to Atlanta, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, April 22, 2015
Whatever their nominal subjects, musical comedies today are usually about musical comedies. Consider three of the funniest of the last ten years: Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone, and The Book…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:46PMTuesday, April 21, 2015
Can we please get this straight, Broadway? Sprawling European novels do not make great musicals. Sorry, Les Miz partisans and Phantomaniacs, but whatever the virtues of those shows — and t…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, April 20, 2015
It’s not fair to judge a play by its bloopers; almost everything that has ever appeared onstage has had its share of dropped lines, missed entrances, Parkinsonian sets, or plummeting Spide…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM 
