1,324 stories by "Charles McNulty"
Be careful what you wish for. Tea with Glenda Jackson, an actress I've admired since watching "A Touch of Class" on TV with my mother as a teenager, turned out not to be the dream encounter …
Anna Camp and Thomas Sadoski costar in an uneven Pasadena Playhouse production of playwright Amy Herzog's drama-with-a-dash-of-"Psycho."
"Little Black Shadows," a new play by Kemp Powers at South Coast Repertory, is set in the 1850s, when slavery in the South is an obdurate fact yet glimmers of a distant dawn are starting to …
Kemp Powers, who found inspiration in historical slave narratives, gets a visually arresting, at times haunting, production of his new play in Costa Mesa.
Rarely has an exclamation point in a title been earned as thoroughly as the one in the new Broadway revival of "Hello, Dolly!" starring Bette Midler. The show, which opened at the Sam S. Shu…
Lili Taylor stars in artist Suzanne Bocanegra's "Farmhouse/Whorehouse," which combines text, music and film centered on the lives of Bocanegra's grandparents, whose small farm stood across t…
Path-breaking artists help us to see the world afresh by challenging our habitual patterns of perception. They shock us into new awareness by joining the disparate and sundering the similar.…
Joshua Harmon's funny play, in a glorious new production at the Geffen Playhouse, follows a gay man in his late 20s whose female BFFs get married, one by one, leaving him ever more anxious a…
Four actors play all the characters of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and George Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan" in Bedlam's touring productions at the Broad Stage through Saturday.
However you judge Bedlam, this young and adventurous New York company deserves extra points for a program with an unusual degree of difficulty. Imagine four actors taking on all the roles no…
With a theme of hope in the face of oppressive politics, the Wooster Group stages 'A Pink Chair,' a piece centered on the work of the late Polish writer and stage director Tadeusz Kantor, so…
We live in an age where the internet has become an open archive. YouTube warehouses our collective nostalgia. (Oh, the hours I've lost watching old music videos and classic tennis matches!) …
Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" belongs to a convention of comedy that isn't coming back anytime soon. The figure of the scolding, abusive wife, a reliable source of hilarity on the …
Playwright Amy Freed revisits the character of the scolding, abusive wife with this female-centric update of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew."
The Times' theater critic sits down with the playwright to discuss two new productions of his masterpiece, "Angels in America" " one at Berkeley Rep and the other in New York, where Kushner …
Edward Albee's Pulitzer-winning drama is the vehicle for Glenda Jackson's return to Broadway. Laurie Metcalf, a Tony winner last year, and Alison Pill co-star.
For one critic recalling the experience of seeing "Angels in America" 25 years ago, the current Broadway revival is perfectly timed, proving the political prescience of playwright Tony Kushn…
The superb new Broadway production of "Angels in America" from London brought back my first encounter with the work at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1993. I had traveled from New Haven to see t…
When it shrugs off its Shakespearean aspirations, Disney's female-centric fairy tale succeeds with comic sweetness and a charming cast.
No one attending "Frozen," the new Broadway musical that had its official opening on Thursday at the St. James Theatre, is meant to ponder the rise of extreme weather events. Leave it to a s…
Theater critic Charles McNulty notes promising productions in the coming season, including Joshua Harmon's "Significant Other," Stephen Karam's "The Humans," Amy Herzog's "Belleville" and Le…
The performance artist sits down with Times theater critic Charles McNulty to discuss "A 24-Decade History of Popular Music," which explores oppression and resistance throughout American his…
The professors and university mandarins having lunch at an elegant UCLA campus restaurant the other day had no idea that seated inconspicuously among them was a cultural revolutionary. Weari…
"Mozart in the Jungle" star Saffron Burrows tries to channel Jacqueline Kennedy in this one-woman production at the Wallis, but a big wig can't make up for a thin script.
I felt sure two of this year's Oscar contenders would satisfy my seasonal yearning for intelligent screen storytelling, but in both cases, I found myself quarreling with the writing and the …
