Monday, September 22, 2014
You can't accuse the Belgian director Ivo van Hove of picking fights with weaklings. His productions of Hedda Gabler, The Little Foxes, and A Streetcar Named Desire, all at New York Theater …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:16PM[SHARE]Thursday, September 18, 2014
The older the money, the stingier the meal " or so goes a persistent Wasp stereotype. Onstage, too, the rich can be unforthcoming. A.R. Gurney's Love Letters, an epistolary play about such w…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 10, 2014
George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum, an Off Broadway hit in 1986, was groundbreaking in the way a gravedigger is. Amid brilliant satirical confetti it declared an end to a certain strain of…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, September 4, 2014
The organizers of A.R. Gurney's yearlong "residency" at the Signature Theatre Company did not lack for options to honor him, even with Love Letters already spoken for. (It opens on Broadway …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 2, 2014
If you've ever seen Waiting for Godot, maybe you've been mystified by Lucky's gibberish tirade halfway through Act One, an eight-minute speech that begins "Given the existence as uttered for…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:15PM[SHARE]Sunday, August 10, 2014
Most contemporary plays, or at least the ones that make it to New York's big stages, can be categorized as Realism Lite: recognizable people doing recognizable things, perhaps with a powder …
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:54PM[SHARE]Thursday, August 7, 2014
What hath Godot wrought? The pregnant, performative style of stage dialogue revolutionized by Beckett and honed by Pinter to express existential dread has, over the years, devolved into a ch…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:16PM[SHARE]Tuesday, August 5, 2014
On a recent evening at the Delacorte in Central Park, a raccoon stopped by unticketed to watch a moment of the Public Theater's new production of King Lear, starring John Lithgow. Following …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:30PM[SHARE]Friday, August 1, 2014
Even on the rare occasions when they're legible, the notes I take in the theater are generally useless " except in those cases where boredom causes them to mutate into to-do lists. I make no…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:05PM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 30, 2014
If you were trying to devise a light comedy for overheated August audiences (and theaters closing out their subscription seasons) you might do worse than a two-hander with a clickbait title …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PM[SHARE]Monday, July 21, 2014
Jersey Boys, which should have been a cautionary tale, has become instead a how-to guide. (Half a billion in Broadway receipts will do that.) It has not only spawned an infestation of jukebo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, July 17, 2014
Elaine Stritch wasn't the star of Company, but she sure as hell made herself the star of its making-of documentary. Dean Jones and the rest of the actors be damned; the drama of her failure …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:32PM[SHARE]Can friendliness be baked into a song, the way peaches are in a pie? On the evidence of Pump Boys and Dinettes, the final presentation of the Encores! Off-Center series this summer, the answ…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:00PM[SHARE]Sunday, July 13, 2014
For all the glibness of his image-crafting, James Franco appears to be sincere in his regard for actual artistic production. And I say this not just in hopes of avoiding the title of Li…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:11PM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 2, 2014
"It's not the length," a friend said after seeing Randy Newman's Faust last night, "it's the Goethe." Indeed, the Encores! Off-Center concert of the 1995 musical was plenty swift, its book (…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:45PM[SHARE]The Shrek with braces was adorable. Actually, so were the other two Shreks. All three had played the chartreuse ogre in high-school productions of the 2008 musical: one at Calvary Chapel Chr…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:30AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 26, 2014
The plight of promising young artists is a subject that's infinitely fascinating to promising young artists. If they fulfill that promise, the rest of us may retrospectively find the plight …
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:04PM[SHARE]Friday, June 20, 2014
One character, his torso already relieved of arms and legs, is tossed onto the barbecue. Another's hands and tongue are severed to keep her from reporting a crime. (She's then stabbed to dea…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 19, 2014
As opening lines of musicals go, it's a long road from "There's a bright golden haze on the meadow" to "They got a nigga / Shedding tears, reminiscing on my past fears / Cause shit was hecti…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:35PM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Every playwriting student sooner or later learns Chekhov's dictum: A gun introduced in the first half of a play must be discharged in the second. Usually the gun is literal, but Ayad Akhtar,…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:15AM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 10, 2014
It's no spoiler to report that the final stage direction of Penelope Skinner's play The Village Bike, brought over from London by MCC Theater and starring Greta Gerwig, is "Mike wanks." The …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Monday, June 9, 2014
Last night's Tony Awards presentation capped off, or at least put to rest, the 2013-2014 Broadway season, which featured very strong if not record ticket-sales of about $1.27 billion. Yay, m…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:20PM[SHARE]Friday, June 6, 2014
By 6 p.m. tonight, the 800-some Tony voters who want to be counted must get their ballots to the accountants' office. I'll have just made the deadline with mine; even though most of the 26 c…
SOURCE: Vulture at 03:30PM[SHARE]Sometimes it seems that all the nutty superstitions surrounding Macbeth " pardon me, "the Scottish Play" " come not from its association with Elizabethan witchcraft or backstage mish…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:29PM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Arrivals and Departures is Alan Ayckbourn's 78th play, which means (if I have my math right) he's written one each year since birth and three before it. (He's 75.) This may explain or at lea…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Sunday, June 1, 2014
Unable to get much attention amid pre-Tony hysteria and post-Tony exhaustion, some Off Broadway companies seem to take advantage of the blackout to dump inventory. Be warned: June is therefo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:23PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 22, 2014
The woe of hard work " the conflict between the dignity of labor and the indignity of actual laboring " has long been a favorite theatrical theme, with only the particulars changing to suit …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Sunday, May 18, 2014
Euripides wasn't much of a yock-meister, but his Medea is getting most of the laughs in Nicky Silver's new supposed-to-be-a-comedy, Too Much Sun. Now at the Vineyard in a grim production dir…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]Friday, May 9, 2014
Whores are so jolly. At least in France. Take Irma la Douce, that charming poule: What won't she get into! First, she falls in love with a law student who figures out a way to get her off th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:53PM[SHARE]Sunday, January 26, 2014
Monday, January 13, 2014
If the recently dead Funny Girl revival ever gets resurrected, producers should look no further than the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theatre for their Fanny Brice.
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:57PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
