168 stories by "Hilton Als"
Long ago, in the late nineteen-seventies, when I treated Manhattan like one big discothèque, or the glittery gritty mirrored universe in “A Chorus Line,” I also went to part…
Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” may or may not be a great play, but it’s a profoundly fair one. When it was first produced, in 1959, Amiri Baraka’s r…
In a world rife with shifting realities and the vagaries of “truthiness,” some real things still happen, such as this: the playwright and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, round-chest…
The new musical “Rocky” (at the Winter Garden) is an immense spectacle. But it’s a spectacle of waste. Based on the 1976 movie, which starred Sylvester Stallone as the epon…
Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” is a play with a fantastic theme, but, as directed by Linda Ames Key (at the Pearl), it’s not so fantastic to watch. First produced in Pa…
Money is the more binding of the corsets that the female characters have to deal with in Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, “A Doll’s House” (currently in revival at BAM’…
A playwright’s voice isn’t everything. Certainly not when it comes to our superficial enjoyment of a show. Watching a straight drama or comedy, we listen less for literary invent…
Nancy Kwan was the first. The first movie star my brother and I fell in love with. We met her late at night in the black-and-white universe of our television set. We saw her, initially, in h…
8220;Machinal” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at the American Airlines) is hard to get a handle on and often hard to handle, because it’s a flop and a hit. The hit par…
In 1987, while working as an assistant in the Village Voice’s art department, I came across a strikingly laid-out book. It had photographs of unknown black people mixed in with photogr…
When you run a not-for-profit space devoted to the performing arts, personal attractiveness helps. But it’s a tricky thing to handle. You want to be a star in order to attract other st…
Conor McPherson’s “The Night Alive” (an Atlantic Theatre Company production at the Linda Gross, directed by the playwright) is about poverty, economic and otherwise. ItR…
My first brush with existentialism came not through my college-era reading list—Kierkegaard, Kafka—but when I first heard Burt Bacharach. This was in the old country of childhood…
The most significant incarnation of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play “Waiting for Godot” I’ve ever seen was staged outdoors, in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The ye…
As long ago as the nineteen-nineties, a group of young performers—Sarah Jessica Parker, Billy Crudup, and Ethan Hawke among them—entertained audiences with a new style of acting.…
From Zadie Smith’s 2013 essay “Joy”: “If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves…
Harold Pinter’s artistic vision focussed less on love than on the con. Born in 1930, Pinter grew up Jewish in modest circumstances in London’s East End, the beloved only child of…
Period detail and a magnetic turn by Jeffrey Wright elevate the current season of “Boardwalk Empire.”
Marie Antoinette continues to interest us because punishment does. Born in Vienna in 1755 and executed in Paris thirty-seven years later, she has never had what one might call a dramatically…
In a series of interviews conducted with the British-born playwright Harold Pinter in 1971, Mel Gussow said that he was struck by the emotion and lyricism in some of the author’s post-…
The notion that theatre is universal is specious, given the world of difference that can separate the productions in New York’s uptown and downtown theatres. In the nineteen-fifties, O…
Writers, for the most part, find themselves not in writing but in revision. The “I” of personal narrative—the egotism it takes to display one’s point of view in a nov…
What happens when you pimp out the pop in a pop masterpiece? Does it cheapen the original work by association? An unfortunate aspect of the thirty or so modern-day screen adaptations of R…
When you think about the talented children of famous parents, you don’t necessarily think about their gifts so much as their genes. Could the famous offspring’s renown be based o…
You know Lois Smith. You’ve seen her a million times. Onstage, in the movies, on TV. You might be thinking of Mary Louise Wilson or Elizabeth Wilson—two equally great actresses, …
