Tuesday, February 7, 2017
For a certain stripe of Oscar obsessive—c’est moi—it’s all about actresses. A healthy variety of tough, sly, vulnerable, funny, chilling female performances signals that the state of…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:00AMMonday, January 9, 2017
What a strange and contradictory—and not unentertaining—thing the Golden Globes were to watch last night. On the one hand, “La La Land,” a Hollywood movie musical about the magic of …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:12PMThursday, December 29, 2016
A few years before writing “Guys and Dolls,” which premièred in 1950, Frank Loesser put his sizable talents to work for Uncle Sam, when the U.S. Army hired him to collaborate on a serie…
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“If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable,” Carrie Fisher, who died yesterday, at the age of sixty, wrote in her memoir “Wishful Drinking,” from 2008…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:42PMWednesday, December 21, 2016
The Academy Awards officially need a rabbi. How else to navigate the thorny ethics that seem to sprout up each year around the question of separating the artist from the art? Of course, this…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:00AMWednesday, December 7, 2016
Jane Klain, the indefatigable research manager at the Paley Center for Media, which houses a vast collection of old television and radio programs, goes on archival treasure hunts that someti…
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Early in 2010, Cheryl Strayed got an e-mail from an acquaintance, Steve Almond, who wrote an advice column—Dear Sugar—for the literary Web site The Rumpus. Strayed was living in Portland…
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Oscar winners aren’t the best barometers by which to gauge the national mood. Movies and politics work at different speeds, reshaping themselves—and absorbing each other—in unpredictab…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:41PMSunday, November 27, 2016
Jason Sudeikis sat at the back of the Bowery Poetry Club, waiting for open-mike night to begin. He had parked his black Vespa outside, having motored in from Clinton Hill, where he lives wit…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:00PMMonday, November 21, 2016
Thursday, November 17, 2016
It’s an odd fact of “Othello” that Iago has more lines than the title character. But inconspicuousness—the ability to keep his own name out of the spotlight while cruelly manipulatin…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:00PMWednesday, November 9, 2016
Around three-thirty yesterday afternoon, Richard Nelson made his final edits to a project that has spanned this parlous political season: a trilogy of quiet and sad dramas called “The Gabr…
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Is Queen Elizabeth II interesting? Not in a world-historical sense—the dwindling power of the monarchy in the postcolonial age, the assortment of turmoils that have raged around her durin…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:00PMFew living actors can match the raw star power of Cate Blanchett, whose hypnotic self-possession—she has the gravitational pull of a small planet—made her a natural for roles like Queen …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, October 14, 2016
In seventh grade, I became completely obsessed with the 1981 musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth. It was my introduction to cynicism, set to a brassy Br…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:20PMIn an era of binge-watching, live-tweeting, and the Oculus Rift, how can theatre compete as all-consuming entertainment? Perhaps it’s our desire to be more than spectators—to be sucked h…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMTuesday, October 4, 2016
It’s become a cliché of this election season that, if you were to present the current Presidential race as fiction, no one would believe it. So what better time to hear from a group of fi…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:01PMFriday, September 30, 2016
Karina Longworth is the host of the popular show “You Must Remember This,” which covers the golden age of cinema.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:43PMThe thirty-eight-year-old actor Andrew Rannells is part of a new crop of gay stars—like Chris Colfer and Tituss Burgess—who never had to bother to be closeted in the public eye. Lean and…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMThursday, September 22, 2016
What were you up to on Friday, September 16th? Did you think about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? Did you talk about the election with the people you encountered? Chances are that you did,…
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George St. Geegland and Gil Faizon are two Upper West Side alter kakers who are partial to turtlenecks, cultural programs at the Y, and the oeuvre of Alan Alda. For a time, they hosted a pr…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:35PMMonday, September 19, 2016
A few days before graduating from Columbia University, in May, 2015, the actress and model Hari Nef showed up at a Flatiron office building to meet Ivan Bart, the president of IMG, the agenc…
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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 08:58AMFriday, July 22, 2016
Most 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, …
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For 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…
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On 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, …
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Yesterday, 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…
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Not 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…
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Of 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…
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Until 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 06:07PMTuesday, November 17, 2015
The 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…
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