Thursday, April 14, 2016
All stage stars seduce their audiences, but how? The winkers do it coyly, the vamps brazenly, the intensos while pretending not to notice you are there. The slightly kinky way Frank Langella…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:54PM[SHARE]Friday, April 1, 2016
According to one survey of high school lit teachers, The Crucible by Arthur Miller is the most widely taught play, outside of Shakespeare, in American classrooms. (A Raisin in the Sun and De…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:35AM[SHARE]Thursday, March 31, 2016
Like the thirteen colonies awkwardly hammered into a union, the musical 1776, which is about that hammering, is a bizarre construction that should not work. The idea for the show was outr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:59PM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 29, 2016
It's easy to understand why playwrights as diverse as Archibald MacLeish (in the verse epic J.B.) and Neil Simon (in the shticky God's Favorite) have been drawn to the Book of Job.…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:50PM[SHARE]Friday, March 25, 2016
At some point between its San Diego premiere in September 2014 and its pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center earlier this winter, the musical Bright Star, which bows at the Cort tonight,…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:33AM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 23, 2016
After the first week of a four-week Phase I trial for a dopamine stimulator called RLU37, the test subjects not only show signs of elevated mood and increased energy but have lost weight and…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:09AM[SHARE]Thursday, March 17, 2016
Unless you're a fanatic with money to burn, you've most likely heard your favorite musicals more than you've seen them. Many a Cats fancier never made it to the Winter Garden to pet the kitt…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:55PM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Clarence McCrane, better known as Strings, is "the third biggest crossover star in the history of country music." In Hold On to Me Darling, Kenneth Lonergan's lumpy and scattershot new play …
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:14PM[SHARE]Monday, March 14, 2016
The first mistake writers of musicals usually make happens before they write: They choose too good or too bad a source. Too good is the more difficult case; the material, having given them d…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:23PM[SHARE]Sunday, March 13, 2016
Danai Gurira's devastating Eclipsed, about four women enslaved as "wives" to a rebel commander during the Liberian civil war, opens this Sunday on Broadway after a sold-out run at the Public…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:13PM[SHARE]It takes a special kind of pluck, or vanity, to name your musical Disaster! and not expect critics to agree. But then everything about the campy little show of that name that's opening tonig…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:13PM[SHARE]The theater is dying. The theater is dead. Oh, look, it's reviving; no, it's dead again. It's always been that way " yet suddenly, now it isn't. For the first time since losing its connectio…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:13PM[SHARE]Through heavy walls and a warren of hallways, before I'm even buzzed into the studio, I recognize Audra McDonald's voice. She's just doing vocalise: singing scales on the syllables eh and oo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:07PM[SHARE]The first word spoken in David Harrower's Blackbird is "shock," and the superb production that opens on Broadway tonight wastes no time in justifying it. Not so much in speech; the next nine…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:04PM[SHARE]On the stage of the Booth Theater, the scenic designer Christopher Oram has built a magnificent ruin of a once-respectable hotel, complete with double-height lobby, an antique elevator, and …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:04PM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Serious naturalism is the New York house style this season, with works like The Humans, Eclipsed, and Blackbird highlighting the spring Broadway lineup. What a surprise, then, that for the l…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:33AM[SHARE]Monday, February 22, 2016
When Mark Rylance accepted the 2008 Tony award for his performance in the French farce Boeing-Boeing, and when he accepted again in 2011 for his performance in the English drama Jerusalem, h…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:45PM[SHARE]Friday, February 19, 2016
The entire action of Stephen Karam's play The Humans takes place in the Chinatown apartment that 26-year-old Brigid Blake has just moved into with her boyfriend, Richard Saad. It's a duplex,…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:49AM[SHARE]Thursday, February 18, 2016
Sam Shepard had already been writing for the theater for 14 years when Buried Child won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. The play"his 23rd or so, depending on how you count"was both a distillatio…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:20AM[SHARE]Friday, February 12, 2016
Four Harvard graduates walk into a scene: Valerie, a young African-American actor; Jackson, an African-American surgical intern; Ginny, a Chinese-Japanese-American psychology professor; and …
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:29AM[SHARE]Thursday, February 11, 2016
One of the many useful and fascinating things the Encores! series has done over the years " last night's opening of Cabin in the Sky marks the start of its 23rd season " is to highlight, and…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:02PM[SHARE]A playwright enters dangerous territory when he attempts to dramatize his struggle to become an artist: a struggle that is supposedly resolved, or at least justified, by the artistry he now …
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:25AM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 9, 2016
My Kindle tells me that it takes an average reader some ten hours to get through Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The delightful Bedlam stage version, which had a successful run in 2014 …
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:10AM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 2, 2016
If theater is a hot medium, musical theater burns, making it a particularly bad match for the coolness of television. The three recent live musicals on NBC (The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, Th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:53PM[SHARE]Friday, January 29, 2016
Stephen Karam's Chinatown apartment, which he moved into after the success of his 2011 play Sons of the Prophet, is a huge step up from his last place. Yes, the elevator is tetchy, and the d…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:40PM[SHARE]Thursday, January 28, 2016
Every year, American Theatre magazine publishes a list of the country's most-produced playwrights. It makes sense that Ayad Akhtar topped the latest edition: His award-winning plays, many pe…
SOURCE: Vulture at 06:53AM[SHARE]Thursday, January 21, 2016
Anna Cantor, the title character of Our Mother's Brief Affair, is a suburban matron, a passive-aggressive parent, and, even in the throes of semi-dementia, a genius with a barb. (As long as …
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:44PM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Will we ever stop arguing about Mother Courage and Her Children? From the time Brecht wrote it, in 1939, as Fascism was approaching its orgasm in Europe, until three weeks ago, when Tonya Pi…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:48PM[SHARE]Thursday, January 14, 2016
The key thing about farce isn't the slamming of doors but the solidity of walls; without rigid order there can be no liberating chaos. The carpentry is crucial, and I doubt there's ever been…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:33PM[SHARE]Monday, January 11, 2016
When Hamilton opened Off Broadway at the Public Theater last February, and then transferred to Broadway in August, many of the reviews, including mine, used words like historic, groundbreaki…
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:56PM[SHARE]Sunday, December 20, 2015
It's hard enough to revive a musical that didn't work the first time; that's why John Doyle's new version of The Color Purple is rightfully such a sensation. But it may be an even harder job…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
