1,908 stories from The New Yorker
"Sold Out Till When?"
A Christmas in the company of Thornton Wilder is not exactly merry. The Peccadillo Theatre Company combines two of Wilder's seasonal one acts""The Long Christmas Dinner" and "Pullman Car Hia…
Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on famil…
For close observers of the cultural phenomenon that is "Hamilton," a new milestone in the musical's unfolding journey was reached last week: the appearance of the understudy in the title rol…
Don’t let the fact that he’s been dead for five hundred and thirty years fool you"there isn’t a more astute political mind around today than that of Richard III, the last P…
This Christmas we are staying in,Skyping en masse with all our kinAnd friends linked up in cyberspace,Slipping the surly bonds of place,And traffic on the Tappan Zee,Cross Bronx, and Hutch, …
"This is the most Kubrickian room," Lin-Manuel Miranda said the other night, sweeping into the seventh floor of the New Museum, on the Bowery. The room was long, very white, with two glass w…
More than sixty years ago, the young Viscountess de Ribes, née Jacqueline Bonnin de La Bonninière de Beaumont, stood on the balcony of a friend's Venetian palazzo. She was twenty-two, and …
The language around Christmas is usually pretty treacly, as befits the season. But future writers should remember that one of the amazing things about the holiday's ur-text, Charles Dickens'…
Two things are frequently said about Caryl Churchill: that she is the greatest playwright alive, and that she is one of the most elusive. While she occasionally discusses her work with resea…
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…
The veteran photographer James Welling has long used architecture as a source of inspiration, beginning with images of Los Angeles, in the late seventies, and continuing through his pictures…
In October, the publisher Hogarth rolled out the first in its ambitious new line of Shakespeare plays retold by contemporary novelists. The pairings are promising: Margaret Atwood, a master …
Jonah Levy, a thirty-year-old trumpet player based in Los Angeles, has lately developed a curious weekend routine. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, he puts on a white shirt, a black tie, bla…
Of the choreographer Agnes de Mille it has been said that she was a better writer than she was a choreographer. That's not the way she planned it. She made twenty-one ballets and the dances …
Michael Flatley is retiring! This is terrible news. But you can see why he'd want to go home. He started Irish step dancing when he was eleven, as he was growing up on Chicago's South Side, …
On a recent Thursday evening, a small crowd gathered in a sweaty upstairs room in a Lutheran church in Bed Stuy for "Mariposa and the Saint," a short play composed entirely from the text of …
Robert O'Hara's new play, "Barbecue" (directed with vigor and understanding by Kent Gash, at the Public), is my idea of an American classic, or the kind of classic we need. Although its fecu…
When Tony Kushner's "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches" opened on Broadway, in 1993, in a production directed by George C. Wolfe, the play ended with a winged angel crashing into a dy…
Hillary Clinton is, so far, the only declared Presidential candidate known to have seen "Hamilton": she attended a performance of the show at the Public Theatre, in March, to which she respo…
Nine years before "Hamilton," the 2006 musical "Spring Awakening" gave the American stage a fresh sound. Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's adaptation of the 1891 Frank Wedekind drama set the r…
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 …
One of the pleasures of the portrait-in-greatness podcast""WTF with Marc Maron" and many dozens of others, multiplying all the time"is the dual presentation of culture and character, the ins…
South African scientists have discovered that 400-year-old tobacco pipes excavated from the garden of William Shakespeare contained cannabis, suggesting the playwright might have written som…
I first heard the poet and comedian Lord Buckley's sui-generis, incredible music-as-talk during a dance performance by Karole Armitage. This was a number of years ago, but sometimes, when I …
