1,308 stories by "Charles McNulty"
Jason Alexander directs "Native Garden," Karen ZacarÃas' comedy about neighbors disputing property lines, horticulture and difference.
Jocelyn Bioh's 'School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,' a tale about backbiting teenagers at Ghana's most exclusive boarding school, opens at the Kirk Douglas Theatre
The title of Jocelyn Bioh's "School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play," is an accurate description of this entertaining comedy, which transplants a familiar American scenario to a new c…
Anne Bogart directs Euripides' last play about a young, overconfident ruler who rejects the rowdy new religious sect that has swept into Greece.
The surviving Greek tragedies pose inordinate challenges to contemporary theater practitioners, but Euripides' "Bacchae," one of his most beloved works, may be the trickiest of all to stage.…
Review of Lynn Nottage's 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "Sweat," set in a factory turn in Pennsylvania, where economic fears are igniting racial tensions
The state of the nation play has a long tradition in Britain, where playwrights are encouraged to think of the theater as a public forum, a place to debate the issues of the day and track th…
When "Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations," the Broadway-bound jukebox musical, is in motion, it's a force almost as irresistible as any of the powerhouse R&B band's great…
Review of "Ain't Too Proud," a jukebox musical about the lives of "The Temptations."
At this peak, his plays were popular in a "Hamilton" sort of way, but that didn't necessarily earn Neil Simon respect among theater writers. The Times' theater critic looks at the trajectory…
In his critics notebook, Charles McNulty opines that Heath Ledger's short legacy as a screen actor offers us enough evidence of the rarity of his talent.
Two new Broadway musicals with commercial hooks have opened this summer, one progressive in its approach to gender and sexuality, the other regressive about such matters. But the same proble…
The rom-com magic that propelled the Julia Roberts movie and the progressive gender politics the drive the Go-Go's jukebox musical can't quite overcome fundamental flaws in two of Broadway's…
The gender bending in the New Swan Shakespeare Festival production of 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is pulled off with aplomb, and if the comic approach goes a little too far, at least the shena…
The gender bending in the New Swan Shakespeare Festival production of 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is pulled off with aplomb, and if the comic approach goes a little too far, at least the shena…
The playwright of "Cost of Living" and "Ironbound" invites us into worlds that theatergoers have been trained to look past: domestic workers with foreign accents, factory laborers who strugg…
Martyna Majok, the Polish-born American playwright whose play "Cost of Living" won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year, invites us into worlds that theatergoers have been trained to look …
Capitalism and its discontents: Two new plays chronicle worlds undone by money " Ben Power's brilliantly acted adaptation of the origin story for the company too big to fail, with Sam Mendes…
Beyond being two of the most anticipated new dramas in London this summer, Ben Power's English adaptation of Italian playwright Stefano Massini's "The Lehman Trilogy" at the National Theatre…
The Geffen Playhouse premieres Peet's play, which centers on a 10-year-old tennis phenom, her mother and her coach and which stars Mamie Gummer, Abigail Dylan Harrison, Caroline Heffernan, T…
Amanda Peet, an actress whose conventional beauty is spiked with a refreshing awkwardness, has branched out into writing. Her play "The Commons of Pensacola" made a respectable showing at Ma…
Kate Burton portrays the parental magician in a gender-flipped take on Shakespeare's "The Tempest," directed by Joe Dowling, at the Old Globe.
Casting a woman as Prospero in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" is no longer a novelty. Helen Mirren starred as Prospera in the 2010 Julie Taymor film and, more recently, Harriet Walter p…
First things first: Let's have a round of applause for Reprise 2.0, the reboot of Reprise Theatre Company, which officially closed in 2013. Lovers of old musicals " baby boomers and their el…
The Reprise series is back after a five year absence, this time branded Reprise 2.0. It opens at the Freud Playhouse with Kathleen Marshall dusting off an old defunct gem.
