Monday, 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 10:00PMSunday, April 19, 2015
I already thought that Fun Home was the best new musical of the year in 2013, when it opened at the Public Theater. It’s hard to imagine that its Broadway transfer, and transformation, wil…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, April 16, 2015
There really was a King and there really was an I. The King was Phra Bat Somdet Phra Poramenthra Maha Mongkut Phra Chom Klao Chao Yu Hua, more generally known as Mongkut. The “I” was Ann…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, April 15, 2015
Provenance is a concept usually associated with art, not theater. Who, after all, owns a plot — or the history on which it is based? Still, the problem rears up in several ways in Finding …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMTuesday, April 14, 2015
With its title reminiscent of that very old standard “It Had to Be You,” the new musical It Shoulda Been You sounds like a retread even before it starts. The impression does not abate on…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, April 12, 2015
The curtain is already up at the Palace as you make your way to your seats for An American In Paris; the stage is empty except for a piano dead center. There’s no overture, and, when the s…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, April 9, 2015
With more than 1,500 seats, the Winter Garden is generally considered too large for plays: too lacking in intimacy and too hard to fill. In any case, it hasn’t housed a nonmusical since 19…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMWednesday, April 8, 2015
What kingdoms were to Elizabethan drama, co-ops are today. In contemporary plays as diverse as Skylight, Belleville, and Between Riverside and Crazy, domestic real estate is not just a setti…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMA note in the Playbill for the new production of Gigi explains that the title character “first burst upon the world” in a novella by “French authoress” Colette. Authoress? It says ev…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, April 7, 2015
For centuries, theatrical antiheroes have vied for attention by going to extremes, but Tyrone, in Robert Askins’s Hand to God, may be the first, onstage at least, to bite off an ear. He’…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMThursday, April 2, 2015
It may not at first make sense that two such fundamentally different acting styles as Bill Nighy’s and Carey Mulligan’s should coexist in — and mutually enhance — one play. And yet h…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMFriday, March 27, 2015
The largest Broadway houses have fewer than 2,000 seats; Radio City Music Hall has almost 6,000. So you might expect Radio City’s New York Spring Spectacular, a sticky amalgam of musical t…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:17PMThursday, March 19, 2015
You cannot look at Heidi Holland, the heroine of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, without seeing, dimly and slightly out of phase behind her, Wasserstein herself. It’s not just …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMThe ick factor is high in Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon, the second of this season’s three Encores! presentations. I’m referring to the story, a mortifying one even by the standa…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:16PMMonday, March 16, 2015
The flat lives and flatter affects of the below-40 set have been the subject of enough recent plays to warrant a collective name; how about Theater of the Becalmed? These are generally sour …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:43PMSunday, March 15, 2015
There are a million big reasons that On the Twentieth Century, the 1978 musical by Cy Coleman and Comden and Green, shouldn’t work today: It’s profoundly silly, tonally tricky, too big f…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:56PMFriday, March 13, 2015
There are few plays I disliked last year as much as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, the story of a nasty white Arkansas family discovering in the ancestral plantation a collection of…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:18AMTuesday, March 10, 2015
Peggy Lee and Lena Horne lived long enough to star in their own bio-musicals; Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, and Dinah Washington became theatrical subjects only after their deaths. Either wa…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:04PMSunday, March 8, 2015
Seldom do costumes provide the bulk of a play’s drama, but in Peter Morgan’s The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, the greatest surprises and transformations are all…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PMThursday, March 5, 2015
In the first episode of season five of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the character of Larry David, played by Larry David, is reduced to the cosmic indignity of buying tickets for High Holiday servic…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, March 2, 2015
A new play that reads very well on the page risks getting staged above its station. Sad to say, The Mystery of Love & Sex, by Bathsheba Doran, is that kind: engrossing in theory, a botch…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:15PMWednesday, February 18, 2015
In a funny-awkward meeting that takes place near the beginning Verité, a pair of Norwegian publishers tells Jo Darum, our heroine, that she has a captivating authorial voice but the wro…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, February 17, 2015
I don’t mean to suggest that you’re unpatriotic if you aren’t moved by Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sensational new hip-hop biomusical at the Public. But in order to dislike it you…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMFriday, February 13, 2015
People who love stage musicals have learned to dread their movie adaptations; infidelity leading to disaster is pretty much in the contract. So those of us who treasure The Last Five Years, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:50PMThursday, February 12, 2015
Though The Iceman Cometh is generally considered one of Eugene O’Neill’s greatest plays, it did not win (as four of his others did) the Pulitzer Prize; the Pulitzer is not, after all, aw…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMSunday, February 8, 2015
The Civilians call the work they do “investigative theater,” which sounds very high-minded; their name, too, suggests engagement in the real life of society as opposed to the artificial …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, February 5, 2015
Sometimes — and I mean this in a good way — the Encores! series at City Center seems like the musical equivalent of A Night at the Museum, making the dinosaurs dance. That’s certainly …
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:28PMMonday, February 2, 2015
A brief pause in the drumbeat of new openings left me time last week to catch up with two Off Broadway plays I’d missed earlier in January. Both had gotten mixed reviews — not just varie…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:04PMThursday, January 29, 2015
It’s said that Chekhov was always trying to get the Moscow Art Theater to produce Ivan Turgenev’s neglected classic A Month in the Country instead of his own new plays. Was this homage, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:00PMSunday, January 25, 2015
The frequent collaborators John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett seem to be everywhere these days, not just geographically but narratively. Whether the tale they’re telling is psychological (as …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:34PMThursday, January 22, 2015
By the standards of the Golden Age, when musicals with a cast of 60 and an orchestra of 40 were common, Into the Woods is not a huge show. Its 1987 Broadway premiere featured just 19 actors …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PM 
