223 stories by "Michael Schulman"
"Actors aren't animals! They're human beings!" the wise producer Leo Bloom once said, to which his partner, Max Bialystock, replied, "They are? Have you ever eaten with one?" Most of the Osc…
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 the cin…
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 Hollywoo…
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 series of…
"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. Fisher's…
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…
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…
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 wit…
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 unpredictable bur…
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…
Dear Vice-President-elect Pence,
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 manipulating events…
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 Gabrie…
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…
Few 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 Eliz…
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 Broadw…
In 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 headl…
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 fict…
Karina Longworth is the host of the popular show "You Must Remember This," which covers the golden age of cinema.
The 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 boy…
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,…
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 …
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…
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 Donald Tr…
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, outs…
