Growing up in Manhattan in the eighties, I loved the TV commercials for the electronics chain “Crazy Eddie.” What kid wouldn’t? The pitchman, an unholy mashup of Pee-wee Herman and Don…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:58AMMost theatregoers I know have an almost physical aversion to audience participation. That’s probably because audience members are often cast in the role of patsy—set up to look awkward, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:11PMFor more than a year now, any half-conscious prognosticator could have told you that the 2016 Antoinette Perry Awards would unofficially be the “Hamilton” Tonys. Mostly, it was. Nominate…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:15PMOn April 5, 1895, Oscar Wilde was holed up at the Cadogan Hotel, in London, torn between fleeing the country and facing a parlous fate. Spurred by his sometime paramour Lord Alfred Douglas, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:01AMYesterday, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition released its annual report of “Ethnic Representation on New York Stages.” On Broadway and Off, thirty per cent of available role…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:12PMNot long ago, a resident of the Financial District named Evan Miles settled in for a theatrical production on Forty-second Street. He was not an experienced playgoer—actually, this was his…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:26PMOf the many allusions woven throughout Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score for “Hamilton”—“The Pirates of Penzance,” the Notorious B.I.G.—one of the funniest comes in Act II, when Alexa…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:44AMUntil a few weeks ago, if you wanted to see Africa represented in a Broadway show, you had two options, both ridiculous. There is the colorful puppet wilderness of “The Lion King,” in wh…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:07PMThe theatre has the power—more like the prerogative—to warp reality to suit its own ends, exiting the literal world through whatever trapdoors it creates. Why does an angel crash through…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:34PMMovie stars crash-landing on Broadway seems de rigueur, but last season “Fun Home” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” led the pack without famous names. This fal…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:35AMLin-Manuel Miranda’s rightfully lauded hip-hop musical “Hamilton,” which has just opened on Broadway after a smash run at the Public, is about many things, among them men: how they fig…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:45AMBroadway loves a messy, washed-up diva who cleans up (only so much) for a comeback, and on Monday night that diva was “Smash.” It’s been two years since NBC cancelled the series, a mus…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:22PMThe Tony Awards broadcast is an act of contortion, in which one medium (live theatre) simultaneously puffs itself up and scrunches itself down to fit into another (television). Every once in…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:46PMBroadway and football: it was only a matter of time before someone put the two together.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:58PMIt’s a bad day to be Harvey Weinstein’s assistant. That is, a particularly bad day. The Pooh-Bah of Oscar campaigning cannonballed into Broadway this year, as the lead producer of “Fin…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:43PMThe playwright Joshua Harmon is thirty-one years old and currently in his third year at Juilliard. He lives on the Upper West Side, because Wendy Wasserstein lived there, too. The first play…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 09:30AMBroadway is an old dog, slow to learn new tricks. But every now and then it aces one of its old tricks. The audiences who flocked to Lincoln Center’s 2008 revival of “South Pacific” wo…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFor the past year or so, a certain segment of the population—musical-theatre fans who were children in the eighties and thought they were too good for Andrew Lloyd Webber—has experienced…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMAs revealed in a new memoir, “Not My Father’s Son,” Mr. Cumming lived for years under the long shadow of his father — or, at least, the man he thought was his father.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 07:10PMOne night this spring, Amanda Burden went to see the new Broadway musical “If/Then.” She had recently returned from a “psychic healing” retreat in Arizona, having spe…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMAt their best, the Tony Awards dance like nobody’s watching.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:05AMAmong the trends on Broadway this season: musicals about sixties girl rockers (Janis Joplin, Carole King); bravura performances by men in drag (Neil Patrick Harris, Mark Rylance); and raw eg…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMShakespeare’s women, Harold Bloom has observed, are always marrying down. Is Orlando truly worthy of Rosalind, with her panoptic wit? How does Viola wind up with that ninny Orsino? Per…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMLaTanya Richardson Jackson is honored by a roomful of star-powered women.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:23PMTwo aspiring trampoliners arrived the other day at Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM), a fitness and dance studio in Williamsburg, described by its founder, Elizabeth Streb, as a “b…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMIt’s not often that a single member of the audience commands more attention than the action onstage.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:16PMThe new documentary “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me” shows its eighty-nine-year-old subject’s ferocious dual nature.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:31PMSomewhere in the bowels of the Belasco Theatre, long considered to be haunted by its namesake, the actor Mark Rylance has installed a Ping-Pong table. “I like to encourage a playful pl…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMI sat directly behind Stephen Sondheim at a performance of “Fun Home,” a new musical at the Public.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:39PMSince Janis Joplin died, in the fall of 1970, her younger siblings, Laura and Michael Joplin, have jointly watched over her estate.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:08PMBy the time Vickie Lynn Hogan was twenty-six, she had made a name for herself, having modelled for Guess jeans and appeared on the cover of Playboy. The name was Anna Nicole Smith. A native …
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