Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Around three-thirty yesterday afternoon, Richard Nelson made his final edits to a project that has spanned this parlous political season: a trilogy of quiet and sad dramas called "The Gabrie…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:46PM[SHARE]Friday, November 4, 2016
Is Queen Elizabeth II interesting? Not in a world-historical sense"the dwindling power of the monarchy in the postcolonial age, the assortment of turmoils that have raged around her durin…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:00PM[SHARE]Few living actors can match the raw star power of Cate Blanchett, whose hypnotic self-possession"she has the gravitational pull of a small planet"made her a natural for roles like Queen Eliz…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Friday, October 14, 2016
In seventh grade, I became completely obsessed with the 1981 musical "Merrily We Roll Along," by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth. It was my introduction to cynicism, set to a brassy Broadw…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:20PM[SHARE]In an era of binge-watching, live-tweeting, and the Oculus Rift, how can theatre compete as all-consuming entertainment? Perhaps it's our desire to be more than spectators"to be sucked headl…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 4, 2016
It's become a cliché of this election season that, if you were to present the current Presidential race as fiction, no one would believe it. So what better time to hear from a group of fict…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:01PM[SHARE]Friday, September 30, 2016
The thirty-eight-year-old actor Andrew Rannells is part of a new crop of gay stars"like Chris Colfer and Tituss Burgess"who never had to bother to be closeted in the public eye. Lean and boy…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 22, 2016
What were you up to on Friday, September 16th? Did you think about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? Did you talk about the election with the people you encountered? Chances are that you did,…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 21, 2016
George St. Geegland and Gil Faizon are two Upper West Side alter kakers who are partial to turtlenecks, cultural programs at the Y, and the oeuvre of Alan Alda. For a time, they hosted a …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:35PM[SHARE]Monday, September 19, 2016
A few days before graduating from Columbia University, in May, 2015, the actress and model Hari Nef showed up at a Flatiron office building to meet Ivan Bart, the president of IMG, the agenc…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 17, 2016
Growing up in Manhattan in the eighties, I loved the TV commercials for the electronics chain "Crazy Eddie." What kid wouldn't? The pitchman, an unholy mashup of Pee-wee Herman and Donald Tr…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:58AM[SHARE]Friday, July 22, 2016
Most theatregoers I know have an almost physical aversion to audience participation. That's probably because audience members are often cast in the role of patsy"set up to look awkward, outs…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:11PM[SHARE]Monday, June 13, 2016
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 01:15PM[SHARE]Friday, May 6, 2016
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, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:01AM[SHARE]Tuesday, May 3, 2016
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:12PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 20, 2016
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:26PM[SHARE]Friday, March 25, 2016
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 …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:44AM[SHARE]Sunday, March 13, 2016
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 …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:07PM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 17, 2015
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:34PM[SHARE]Friday, August 21, 2015
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 …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:35AM[SHARE]Friday, August 7, 2015
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 06:45AM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 10, 2015
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:22PM[SHARE]Monday, June 8, 2015
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:46PM[SHARE]Monday, May 25, 2015
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:43PM[SHARE]Friday, March 27, 2015
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 09:30AM[SHARE]Friday, February 27, 2015
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, December 24, 2014
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Friday, October 3, 2014
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.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 07:10PM[SHARE]Monday, June 23, 2014
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…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
