Thursday, 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 08:00PMSunday, January 18, 2015
Like “humanistic Judaism,” the term “imaginative theater” ought to be a redundancy. (Shouldn’t all theater be imaginative?) Still, some troupes seek to differentiate themselves fro…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:27PMThursday, January 15, 2015
The new musical Honeymoon in Vegas is a throwback, and not just because it’s based on a 1992 movie that was, even then, somewhat retrograde in its humor. Cancel the “somewhat”: The plo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, January 13, 2015
Would you like to see a two-hander in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a hunky but bashful British beekeeper, hemming and half-smiling, while Ruth Wilson, so recently embaubled with a Golden Glob…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:35PMThursday, January 8, 2015
The Suicide, Nikolai Erdman’s biting 1928 satire of Soviet thought control, so overflows with ironies that they seem to slosh into real life. To begin with, the play died by its own hand: …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, December 21, 2014
It would not ordinarily be newsworthy that a performer named Gordon Sumner took over a secondary role in a struggling Broadway musical. You do not hear much about cast changes at On the…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, December 16, 2014
A famous agent used to instruct clients never to set a scene in a bus: Americans don’t mind stories that are sad, he said, but they draw the line at downmarket depressing. Apparently Samue…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:25AMSunday, December 14, 2014
Aside from “Frank Wildhorn,” the two words I least want to hear in conjunction with a show I’m about to attend are “audience participation.” The prospect of being dragooned into aw…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:23PMTuesday, December 9, 2014
This week, Vulture will be publishing our critics' year-end lists. Enjoy. 1. Audra McDonald in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & GrillBroadwayNot many New York productions this year wer…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:50PMMonday, December 8, 2014
When you enter the East 4th Street home of New York Theatre Workshop, you can never be sure what you’re going to find. The blank-slate interior has been turned into an amphitheater for Car…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, December 7, 2014
As Peter Pan is traditionally portrayed by a gamine actress, and Hairspray’s Edna Turnblad by a chunky actor, theatrical tradition dictates that John Merrick, the grotesquely deformed titl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, December 4, 2014
Some 17 Sally Bowleses painted their nails green and sang “Maybe This Time” for the Sam Mendes revisal of Cabaret that ran on Broadway from March 1998 (Natasha Richardson) through Januar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, November 24, 2014
A Cornish knight, an Irish princess, and the king they both betray by falling in love: For centuries the tale circulated Europe in various forms. But after Wagner’s monumental Tristan und …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, November 20, 2014
To begin with, A Delicate Balance is a masterpiece. I’m not sure that anything in Edward Albee’s daunting catalog — some 30 plays — surpasses it. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMIf Mike Nichols ever produced anything as banal as a résumé, it would have looked highly suspicious, the humblebrag of a con man. He did too many things, they were too far-flung, a…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:45PMWednesday, November 19, 2014
With all the larks praying and bird-pairs bursting in song, it’s sometimes hard to hear the real voice of Oscar Hammerstein in his lyrics. But his “poetic,” not to say ornithological, …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:15PMMonday, November 17, 2014
Despite what seemed like weeks of buzz about its radical transformations, the revival of Side Show that opened on Broadway tonight is not as meaningfully different from the 1997 or…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:45PMIn 2003, when she was not yet 30, Young Jean Lee founded a theater company for the purpose of producing her own work. Call it savvy or call it hubris, the move was bold, especially for an ar…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, November 16, 2014
What with The Last Ship, Disgraced, and seminude Bradley Cooper all on the boards this fall, Broadway is more testosterony than usual, full of scruff and blowtorches, beefcake and wife-beati…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMTuesday, November 11, 2014
It’s surprising how much you can remove from a play and still have a play — hell, Beckett lets a pair of disembodied lips yak at you for 15 minutes and it’s riveting theater. But David…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, November 9, 2014
The Band Wagon has been a lot of things. First it was a groundbreaking musical revue, with sketches by George S. Kaufman and songs by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, including the classic …
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:42PMThursday, November 6, 2014
The story goes that the wife of the composer Jerome Kern and the wife of the librettist Oscar Hammerstein II were seated next to each other at a dinner party. An admirer of Show Boat, the tw…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:30PMMonday, November 3, 2014
One of the spring’s most enjoyable new comedies was Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss, a big wet smooch on the lips to theatrical narcissism. Raucous and ribald, it fit uncertainly in the tra…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:04PMThursday, October 30, 2014
The great vernacular revolution of the 1960s turned theatrical dialogue from a prancing pony into a workhorse. With realism ascendant, serious drama, and eventually comedy, demanded a perfec…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, October 28, 2014
Suzan-Lori Parks has a lot of nerve. A few years back she wrote and organized something she called 365 Days/365 Plays, which really was what its name suggested. Before that, in Topdog/Underd…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, October 26, 2014
One night at the Public Theater last September, Sting arrived onstage to perform some songs he had written for the upcoming musical The Last Ship. As the applause died down, an overenthusias…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:19PMThursday, October 23, 2014
It’s a good thing that the playwright Ayad Akhtar is Muslim, because if any non-Muslim wrote Disgraced — and you could almost imagine someone like Bruce Norris wanting to — the respons…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThere’s a moment three-quarters of the way through the first act of The Fortress of Solitude, a new musical based on the Jonathan Lethem novel, when all of the show’s developing threads …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00AMMonday, October 20, 2014
Plays about writing are bores or lies or both. The drama of the process, entirely internal and largely concerned with semicolons, can’t be staged, so a different drama has to be manufactur…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMFriday, October 17, 2014
Basil Twist has been famous for stretching the boundaries of puppetry at least since his 1998 water-tank ballet of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. For Twist, the aim of the boundary-stret…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:10PMThursday, October 16, 2014
On the Town is a heartbreakingly youthful work: both about youth and by youth. Watching its three sailors pursue a lifetime of adventure while on 24-hour shore leave in New York, New York, y…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM 
