Thursday, 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 10:00PMWednesday, October 15, 2014
Slackers don’t usually get very far in musicals. From Oklahoma! to Gypsy and beyond, American-style can-do-ism is built into the form; it’s hard to mumble a showstopper. And yet here is …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00AMThursday, October 9, 2014
The playwright Terrence McNally, who turns 75 next month, is not only prolific but prolific in many genres. His catalog, spanning 51 years, includes Broadway comedies like The Ritz and drama…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, October 8, 2014
Funny thing about the avant-garde: Each new wave looks a lot like the last one. So it will come as no surprise to those who have seen a previous Robert Wilson work that his latest New York o…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:44PMSunday, October 5, 2014
If there’s any justice, the superb stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time will be as big a hit on Broadway this year as the original novel, by Mark Haddon, w…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, October 2, 2014
Nikos Psacharopoulos, the longtime head of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, enjoyed the opportunities frequently afforded him to brutalize students and staff. Moron! he would bark. Get off…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, October 1, 2014
Tail! Spin! describes itself as a political comedy, and though it features politicians and is often very funny, I’m not sure the phrase really applies. “Political comedy” suggests some…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMTuesday, September 30, 2014
If everything a great playwright wrote were top-drawer, the drawer probably wouldn’t open. That’s one reason the Roundabout’s fine mounting of Indian Ink — which is second-…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMSunday, September 28, 2014
Most contemporary stage comedies are aggressively joke-based. In effect, the playwright demands that theatergoers bend to the rhythm of his punch lines and cough up laughs on cue. It can be …
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PMMonday, September 22, 2014
You can’t accuse the Belgian director Ivo van Hove of picking fights with weaklings. His productions of Hedda Gabler, The Little Foxes, and A Streetcar Named Desire, all at New York Theate…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:16PMThursday, September 18, 2014
The older the money, the stingier the meal — or so goes a persistent Wasp stereotype. Onstage, too, the rich can be unforthcoming. A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, an epistolary play about su…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, September 10, 2014
George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, an Off Broadway hit in 1986, was groundbreaking in the way a gravedigger is. Amid brilliant satirical confetti it declared an end to a certain strain …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, September 4, 2014
The organizers of A.R. Gurney’s yearlong “residency” at the Signature Theatre Company did not lack for options to honor him, even with Love Letters already spoken for. (It opens on Bro…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMTuesday, September 2, 2014
If you’ve ever seen Waiting for Godot, maybe you’ve been mystified by Lucky’s gibberish tirade halfway through Act One, an eight-minute speech that begins “Given the existence as utt…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:15PMSunday, August 10, 2014
Most contemporary plays, or at least the ones that make it to New York’s big stages, can be categorized as Realism Lite: recognizable people doing recognizable things, perhaps with a powde…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:54PMThursday, August 7, 2014
What hath Godot wrought? The pregnant, performative style of stage dialogue revolutionized by Beckett and honed by Pinter to express existential dread has, over the years, devolved into a ch…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:16PMTuesday, August 5, 2014
On a recent evening at the Delacorte in Central Park, a raccoon stopped by unticketed to watch a moment of the Public Theater’s new production of King Lear, starring John Lithgow. Followin…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:30PMFriday, August 1, 2014
Even on the rare occasions when they’re legible, the notes I take in the theater are generally useless — except in those cases where boredom causes them to mutate into to-do lists. I mak…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:05PMWednesday, July 30, 2014
If you were trying to devise a light comedy for overheated August audiences (and theaters closing out their subscription seasons) you might do worse than a two-hander with a clickbait title …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, July 21, 2014
Jersey Boys, which should have been a cautionary tale, has become instead a how-to guide. (Half a billion in Broadway receipts will do that.) It has not only spawned an infestation of jukebo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, July 17, 2014
Elaine Stritch wasn’t the star of Company, but she sure as hell made herself the star of its making-of documentary. Dean Jones and the rest of the actors be damned; the drama of her failur…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:32PMCan friendliness be baked into a song, the way peaches are in a pie? On the evidence of Pump Boys and Dinettes, the final presentation of the Encores! Off-Center series this summer, the answ…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:00PMSunday, July 13, 2014
For all the glibness of his image-crafting, James Franco appears to be sincere in his regard for actual artistic production. And I say this not just in hopes of avoiding the title of Li…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:11PMWednesday, July 2, 2014
“It’s not the length,” a friend said after seeing Randy Newman’s Faust last night, “it’s the Goethe.” Indeed, the Encores! Off-Center concert of the 1995 musical was plenty swi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:45PMThe Shrek with braces was adorable. Actually, so were the other two Shreks. All three had played the chartreuse ogre in high-school productions of the 2008 musical: one at Calvary Chapel Chr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:30AMThursday, June 26, 2014
The plight of promising young artists is a subject that’s infinitely fascinating to promising young artists. If they fulfill that promise, the rest of us may retrospectively find the pligh…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:04PMFriday, June 20, 2014
One character, his torso already relieved of arms and legs, is tossed onto the barbecue. Another’s hands and tongue are severed to keep her from reporting a crime. (She’s then stabbed to…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00AMThursday, June 19, 2014
As opening lines of musicals go, it’s a long road from “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow” to “They got a nigga / Shedding tears, reminiscing on my past fears / Cause shit…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:35PMWednesday, June 18, 2014
Every playwriting student sooner or later learns Chekhov’s dictum: A gun introduced in the first half of a play must be discharged in the second. Usually the gun is literal, but Ayad Akhta…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:15AMTuesday, June 10, 2014
It’s no spoiler to report that the final stage direction of Penelope Skinner’s play The Village Bike, brought over from London by MCC Theater and starring Greta Gerwig, is “Mike wanks.…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, June 9, 2014
Last night’s Tony Awards presentation capped off, or at least put to rest, the 2013-2014 Broadway season, which featured very strong if not record ticket-sales of about $1.27 billion. Yay,…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:20PM 
