223 stories by "Michael Schulman"
For more than a year now, any half-conscious prognosticator could have told you that the 2016 Antoinette Perry Awards would unofficially be the "Hamilton" Tonys. Mostly, it was. Nominated fo…
On April 5, 1895, Oscar Wilde was holed up at the Cadogan Hotel, in London, torn between fleeing the country and facing a parlous fate. Spurred by his sometime paramour Lord Alfred Douglas, …
Yesterday, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition released its annual report of "Ethnic Representation on New York Stages." On Broadway and Off, thirty per cent of available roles we…
Not long ago, a resident of the Financial District named Evan Miles settled in for a theatrical production on Forty-second Street. He was not an experienced playgoer"actually, this was his f…
Of the many allusions woven throughout Lin-Manuel Miranda's score for "Hamilton"""The Pirates of Penzance," the Notorious B.I.G."one of the funniest comes in Act II, when Alexander Hamilton …
Until a few weeks ago, if you wanted to see Africa represented in a Broadway show, you had two options, both ridiculous. There is the colorful puppet wilderness of "The Lion King," in which …
The theatre has the power"more like the prerogative"to warp reality to suit its own ends, exiting the literal world through whatever trapdoors it creates. Why does an angel crash through a g…
Movie stars crash-landing on Broadway seems de rigueur, but last season "Fun Home" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" led the pack without famous names. This fall, star …
Lin-Manuel Miranda's rightfully lauded hip-hop musical "Hamilton," which has just opened on Broadway after a smash run at the Public, is about many things, among them men: how they fight, wr…
Broadway loves a messy, washed-up diva who cleans up (only so much) for a comeback, and on Monday night that diva was "Smash." It's been two years since NBC cancelled the series, a musical d…
The Tony Awards broadcast is an act of contortion, in which one medium (live theatre) simultaneously puffs itself up and scrunches itself down to fit into another (television). Every once in…
Broadway and football: it was only a matter of time before someone put the two together.
It's a bad day to be Harvey Weinstein's assistant. That is, a particularly bad day. The Pooh-Bah of Oscar campaigning cannonballed into Broadway this year, as the lead producer of "Finding N…
The playwright Joshua Harmon is thirty-one years old and currently in his third year at Juilliard. He lives on the Upper West Side, because Wendy Wasserstein lived there, too. The first play…
Broadway is an old dog, slow to learn new tricks. But every now and then it aces one of its old tricks. The audiences who flocked to Lincoln Center's 2008 revival of "South Pacific" won't so…
For the past year or so, a certain segment of the population"musical-theatre fans who were children in the eighties and thought they were too good for Andrew Lloyd Webber"has experienced a p…
As revealed in a new memoir, "Not My Father's Son," Mr. Cumming lived for years under the long shadow of his father " or, at least, the man he thought was his father.
One night this spring, Amanda Burden went to see the new Broadway musical “If/Then.” She had recently returned from a “psychic healing” retreat in Arizona, having spe…
At their best, the Tony Awards dance like nobody’s watching.
Among the trends on Broadway this season: musicals about sixties girl rockers (Janis Joplin, Carole King); bravura performances by men in drag (Neil Patrick Harris, Mark Rylance); and raw eg…
Shakespeare’s women, Harold Bloom has observed, are always marrying down. Is Orlando truly worthy of Rosalind, with her panoptic wit? How does Viola wind up with that ninny Orsino? Per…
LaTanya Richardson Jackson is honored by a roomful of star-powered women.
Two aspiring trampoliners arrived the other day at Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM), a fitness and dance studio in Williamsburg, described by its founder, Elizabeth Streb, as a “b…
It’s not often that a single member of the audience commands more attention than the action onstage.
The new documentary “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me” shows its eighty-nine-year-old subject’s ferocious dual nature.
