45 stories by "John Lahr"
Mark Rosenblatt's début play brings light, shadow, and humor to its portrait of a troubled writer.
Some actresses prefer to meet a journalist for the first time with a press agent in tow; some opt for the neutrality of a restaurant; some suggest the distracting hubbub of the sound stage. …
“Spider-Man”: Zap! Pow! Splat! Ouch!
Tony Kushner and Pedro Almodóvar on the Rialto.
Elia Kazan’s singular career.
In an extract from Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh " winner of the 2015 Sheridan Morley prize for theatre biography " John Lahr revisits the runaway success of The Glass Mena…
Mike Nichols died yesterday at the age of eighty-three. For those who knew and loved him"I count myself among them"his passing is no ordinary loss. Mike was inimitable. The son of a White Ru…
Onstage, she was all prowess; offstage, she was all panic.
By nine-thirty in the morning on Martin Luther King Day, a blustery Arctic wind had emptied West Forty-second Street of most pedestrians, but on the neon-lit fourth floor of the New 42nd Str…
In this archive piece, originally published on 9 March 1994, John Lahr reflects on the US comedian's brand of intellectual anarchyBill Hicks, one of the most daring American stand-up comedia…
Bill Hicks died 20 years ago today. In this obituary, published in the Guardian in 1994, John Lahr reflects on the US comedian's brand of intellectual anarchyBill Hicks, one of the most dari…
Barry Humphries is hanging up Edna’s diamante glasses and her size-9 high heels after this farewell tour.
John Tiffany’s dashing, well-cast revival of “The Glass Menagerie” misses the central emotional point of the drama.
In a good theatregoing year, you’re lucky to get one production of such exhilarating high quality; this year, I got two—Clifford Odets’s “Golden Boy” and Mike N…
"With me it is simple: what I am I can write," Clifford Odets said. When the thirty-one-year-old playwright sat down, in 1937, to write a new play to bankroll the foundering Group …
8220;Playwriting is a young man’s and, of late, a young woman’s game,” David Mamet said, in 2005. “Most playwrights’ best work is probably their earliest. Those…
Christopher Durang’s theatrical specialty is a kind of gleeful comic exaggeration that falls somewhere between farce and satire, between mischief and mayhem, in that territory that Che…
In the lobby of the Palace Theatre, where “Annie” is having a listless revival (under the direction of James Lapine), the Toddler Dreams Shirt (“Dreams Do Come True”)…
In one of the major avant-garde performances of the late nineteen-sixties, the actors of the Living Theatre used to run almost naked through startled Off Broadway audiences, bleating about n…
8220;I think this is the most truly autobiographic play Williams ever wrote,” Elia Kazan said of Tennessee Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth,” which he staged on Broadw…
Enter Nick Payne, a stripling British playwright at the beginning of a great career. Still in his twenties, Payne exudes none of his generation’s glib nihilism. His voice is quiet and …
In every strapped corner of Britain these days, when two or three people are gathered together, the talk is of banks, bailouts, and bonuses. Money is short; tales of greed are long. Nicholas…
In “As You Like It,” Shakespeare’s celebration and sendup of the pastoral, written in 1600, his crew of cast-out characters wander into the Forest of Arden, a place whose n…
If you're betting on this year's Tonys, Broadway's annual cavalcade of champions, keep it right here on the New Yorker Web site. Besides knowing the course-I won one in 2002-I also fancy…
