45 stories by "John Lahr"
8220;The humorous story is strictly a work of art,—high and delicate art,—and only an artist can tell it,” Mark Twain wrote. Will Eno’s “Title and Deed” (…
Before its format was gobbled up by television, in the early sixties, the revue was the bonne bouche of American musical theatre. “The Great American Revue,” a vivacious, well-cu…
Let’s imagine for a minute that you are a director and you’re unhappy with one of Tennessee Williams’s great plays. If you went to one of the archives where reams of his d…
In a review of the 1904 début production of J. M. Barrie’s play “Peter Pan,” the British critic Max Beerbohm wrote, “Mr. Barrie is not that rare creature, a man …
If you stand on London’s Waterloo Bridge, overlooking the Thames as it carries the dust of the ages toward the sea, you will find yourself in one of the most strategic spots in Great B…
In the first beat of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" (now in a luminous revival, directed by Mike Nichols, at the Ethel Barrymore), the salesman Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) tr…
According to Edward Albee, the title of his 1980 play “The Lady from Dubuque” (in revival at the Signature Theatre Company, under the skillful direction of David Esbjornson) owe…
Noël Coward claimed that his life was “one long extravaganza”; as if to prove it, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ “Star Quality: The World o…
For an essay in the magazine on the fiftieth anniversary of the first production of "Death of a Salesman," I visited Arthur Miller at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1999. With his wife…
John Osborne’s rowdy, shocking anger—first broadcast in his play “Look Back in Anger,” which is now in revival at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels…
In 2008, nine years after Margaret Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for her rookie play, “Wit,” she addressed the graduating class of Smith College, her alma mater. She spoke about h…
The most underrated of Shakespeare’s many theatrical gifts—poetic, tragic, festive—is his tabloid mentality. Shakespeare knew the value of the sensational: ghosts, gore, an…
As a stagestruck boy, Anton Chekhov defied school regulations to attend the local playhouse in Taganrog. (He and his friends disguised themselves with false beards and glasses to sit in the …
All fans of the American musical who are sick of boulevard nihilism, movie retreads, choreographic cliché, dopey lyrics, and banal librettos, your ship has come in: “Shlemiel the …
8220;Circumstances make man, not man circumstances,” Mark Twain once quipped. As proof of his claim, take the smart, well-intentioned collection of political operatives who intervene i…
Alan Rickman is the go-to actor for supercilious. Over the years, in screen roles as various as the Sheriff of Nottingham in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” Colonel Brandon in …
On September 21, 2009, three days after her twenty-fifth birthday, Nina Arianda, like most ambitious actresses just out of drama school, was making the rounds in New York, looking for work. …
8220;Ravishing” is the best word for Stephen Karam’s new comedy “Sons of the Prophet” (elegantly directed by Peter DuBois, at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels). At o…
Martin Luther King, Jr., may have had a dream, but it was not to be the subject of a Broadway show. Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop” (directed by Kenny Leon, at the Bernard …
For the nearly two decades between his first hit, “French Without Tears” (1936), and his 1954 play “Separate Tables,” Terence Rattigan was the West End’s most s…
