1,908 stories from The New Yorker
The Brooklyn Academy of Music recently staged a rare production of the entire Henriad""Richard II," "Henry IV" Parts I and II, and "Henry V""by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Henriad is …
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…
Here we go again, back to that terrible summer house in New England, which is yet another depressed character in Eugene O'Neill's unsurpassable "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (now in a Roun…
When Gregory Doran, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, first decided to direct Shakespeare's cycle of English-history plays, he met with Sir Ian McKellen and asked him i…
Shakespeare's influence is so vast that it's hard to choose a selection of New Yorker pieces about him"he comes up everywhere! Still, in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of his dea…
On the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare's death, New Yorker writers share their experiences of reading, watching, studying, performing, memorizing, and fa…
Susan Ades Stone, one of the women behind a campaign to put Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, is a big fan of the musical "Hamilton."Â Like Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's creator, …
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…
In 1962, Lillian and Helen Ross published "The Player," a wonderful collection of interviews with actors, ranging from Maureen Stapleton to Sidney Poitier, many of which originated in this m…
No one who follows classical music can have been remotely surprised by the announcement that came in from the Metropolitan Opera earlier today: James Levine, who has been the dominant artist…
Last week, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers, implicating thousands of people in a global sc…
“Hamlet”
Last year, the British critic Philip Clark had a provocative response to the perennial question of how to save classical music from its so-called image problem"the perception that it is stuf…
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 …
I have so many complicated responses to David Harrower's 2005 play, "Blackbird" (at the Belasco), that trying to separate what I feel about the subject tangentially and what Harrower achieve…
All this talk about diversity"in newspapers, on college campuses, at the Oscars"can be hard on a liberal white guy. How's a sensitive Caucasian man"no Trumpite"supposed to deal with so much …
I'm always somewhat surprised to discover how many of the writers and thinkers I've admired over the years grew up reading Eugene O'Neill with a passion equal to my own. For years, I thought…
Directors who have an interest in style are not prevalent in the American theatre. Mostly, directors are there to serve the play and keep the bodies moving in space as clearly, effectively, …
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 …
It was always exciting to see, around town, those lovely posters by Paul Davis announcing a new production at the Public Theatre""our" theatre, over on Lafayette Street, a place that promote…
The Broadway musical, to the distress of those of us who think of it as America's own fine form, the thing we made first and still, Andrew Lloyd Webber be damned, make best, isn't really pop…
Sunday night saw the première of "Grease: Live," a television adaptation of the original musical that no one really needed but was wholly entertaining nonetheless. The revival came after…
In 1889 Giacomo Puccini wrote to his publisher about getting the operatic rights to Victorien Sardou's melodrama "La Tosca," which the playwright had written for Sarah Bernhardt: "In this 'T…
New York City Opera was once a radiant and seemingly indispensable part of New York's cultural life. But ever since its closure, two and a half years ago, the prospect of reviving the compan…
