Whether you will like These Paper Bullets! " the new Bard"on"Carnaby Street confection at the Atlantic " will probably depend on how much you like Much Ado About Nothing. Depend inversely, I…
How can deprivation become joy? That's not only the animating question of The Color Purple, the 1982 Alice Walker novel made into a musical in 2005, but also the operating principle behind J…
This week Vulture will be publishing our critics' year-end lists. Monday we ran TV and movies. Tuesday covered albums, songs, and books. Today, look for theater, art, and classical performan…
Here's a sampling of things you'll experience at Lazarus, the illustrated concept album disguised as a musical now playing at New York Theatre Workshop: one alien, two serial killers, three …
A disreputable charmer brings the joy of music to a staid community while stirring up romance with an uptight lady: If the plot of School of Rock sounds like a great musical, that's because …
Only in a weak Broadway field could The Wiz have won seven Tony awards, as it did in 1975. Its competition included Mack & Mabel, Shenandoah, and The Lieutenant (which ran for two weeks)…
The opening number of Gigantic, a new musical set at a summer camp for hefty teens, is actually called "The Weight Is Over." That's about the high tide of wit in this chore of a show, which …
Al Pacino is not an actor of much breadth but he stakes a narrow territory deeply, and that can be brilliant to watch onstage. China Doll, his shaky new Broadway vehicle, by David Mamet, off…
There is no such thing as a wholly true play. The nature of the theater distorts reality, finding all sorts of holes in the historical record and inexorably filling them in. (Actors have to …
Just before the final preview of New York Animals last night, Eric Tucker, the show's director, warned the audience that the "glamorous and exacting" play about to begin was still being rewr…
"Satire is what closes on Saturday night," said George S. Kaufman, but that was 90 years ago. Today most satire closes " that is, shuts down internally " before it ever hits the stage. Have …
How many Steves does it take to screw up a marriage? Steven and Stephen are a long-term couple with an 8-year-old son and intimacy issues. Steven's old friend Matt, and Matt's partner, Brian…
The meta-drama of Arthur Miller's plays, much in evidence during this, his centenary year, is the conflict between his moral energy and the theatrical formats in which he (sometimes only bar…
It's an odd paradox that as Broadway fare grows more generic, genre pieces flail. Suspense is especially moribund; A Time to Kill tanked in 2013, and it may be that the last really successfu…
Critics, if not theatergoers, often bemoan the tide of revivals flooding Broadway each fall. This season, the ratio of old plays to new is about two to one. But why should revivals be consid…
British actors have a ritual " or at least Ian McKellen does, because I saw him do it once " of blessing a new stage by kissing it. (He then recited a Shakespearean monologue, but that part'…
When a play trains its basilisk gaze on a demographic you belong to, it may seem as if the playwright took notes inside your head. That's how I felt, anyway, at Dada Woof Papa Hot, Peter Par…
The home that Isaac returns to at the beginning of Taylor Mac's smart but deliberately disorienting new play Hir is not the one he left when he enlisted as a Marine three years ear…
I'm no fan of jukebox musicals. If they're the type that tell an invented tale, like Mamma Mia! or Rock of Ages, the book is generally rendered idiotic by the effort to accommodate the songs…
American leaders usually don't come under theatrical scrutiny until decades after they leave office. The first serious mainstream plays about Presidents Johnson (All the Way) and Nixon (Fros…
Keira Knightley says she has been approached at least three times to play Thérèse Raquin in one or another adaptation of the 1867 Zola novel. She finally succumbed when offered Hel…
If, like me, you enjoyed Annaleigh Ashford as the daffy romantic factory worker in Kinky Boots (for which she won a Clarence Derwent award) and loved her as the talentless balletomane in You…
Great plays are usually great in one of two ways. Either they are culminating examples of existing ideas, or groundbreaking examples of new things entirely. The Humans, by Stephen Karam, at …
Like the M34 bus, Michael John LaChiusa never disappoints for long: If you don't enjoy one show, another will come by soon. At 53, he remains probably the most prolific of his cohort of thea…
It has not been a good fall for elders onstage. A few weeks ago, the meddlesome 70ish character played by Marlo Thomas in Clever Little Lies nearly torpedoed her marriage while trying to sav…