240 stories by "Michael Schulman"
Among the signifiers of a New York summer"the Mister Softee jingle, air-conditioner droplets messing up your hair"is the sound of blank verse. Shakespeare has become a mostly May-to-August a…
Imagine writing yourself the role of a lifetime, only to be replaced by a photogenic, puppy-eyed celebrity version of yourself. Such was the fate of Dave Malloy, the writer, composer, and or…
It seems like a lifetime ago that "Hamilton" swept the 2016 Tony nominations and pointed us toward a bright, progressive future. This year's nominations, which were announced Tuesday morn…
What's sweeter than a rags-to-riches story? Cinderella, Little Orphan Annie, Eliza Doolittle"all made the journey from poverty to the palace, and all have been the subjects of Broadway music…
It's not easy to describe what Randy Weiner does for a living. Some people call him an "impresario," but he comes across more like a mild-mannered cardiologist than like P. T. Barnum. With h…
What did you do this morning? Perhaps you woke up at your regular time, made coffee in the same machine that you did yesterday, took the same commute to work that you do every day. In adult …
Allison Janney spiralled, cranelike, up the ramp of the Guggenheim Museum. She stopped in front of a Kandinsky""Black Lines" (1913), a jumble of Technicolor splotches"and gasped. "My gosh, t…
The heroine of "Amélie," the new musical at the Walter Kerr Theatre, is a dreamy Parisian café waitress who channels her childlike wonder into staging anonymous good deeds on the streets o…
"Firstly, I would like to apologize to those of you involved in our little box-office mixup," a tuxedoed man with a posh accent tells us. "I do hope the six hundred and seventeen of you affe…
The singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles has one of those silvery voices that can bring intimacy to a large stage. Born in Eureka, California, Bareilles played in bars in Los Angeles before brea…
The town of Gander, Newfoundland, has six traffic lights and a population of less than thirteen thousand. Snowmobiling is popular, and people leave their car doors unlocked while they're at …
Since the film "Groundhog Day" came out, in 1993, it's been claimed by existentialists, Buddhists, political theorists, and comedy nerds alike. The story has become a modern parable: a morda…
Not long after "La La Land" was announced Best Picture at the eighty-ninth annual Academy Awards"after which "Moonlight" was announced Best Picture at the eighty-ninth annual Academy Awards,…
"I'm the king of the world! Whooooo!" That line is not, in fact, from President Trump's Inaugural Address but from James Cameron's infamous speech at the 1998 Academy Awards, when he won the…
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences occupies a squat nineteen-seventies building on Wilshire Boulevard, surrounded by car dealerships. On January 14th of last year, Cheryl Boone …
Lisa Henson and Emma Walton Hamilton met only recently, but they have something rare in common: each has a parent who likely held a deep, enchanted place in your childhood. Henson, who is fi…
"We didn't need dialogue," Norma Desmond tells a young screenwriter in "Sunset Boulevard," recalling her silent-film-era glory days. "We had faces!" Screenwriters famously suffer all sorts o…
"Actors aren't animals! They're human beings!" the wise producer Leo Bloom once said, to which his partner, Max Bialystock, replied, "They are? Have you ever eaten with one?" Most of the Osc…
For a certain stripe of Oscar obsessive"c'est moi"it's all about actresses. A healthy variety of tough, sly, vulnerable, funny, chilling female performances signals that the state of the cin…
What a strange and contradictory"and not unentertaining"thing the Golden Globes were to watch last night. On the one hand, "La La Land," a Hollywood movie musical about the magic of Hollywoo…
A few years before writing "Guys and Dolls," which premièred in 1950, Frank Loesser put his sizable talents to work for Uncle Sam, when the U.S. Army hired him to collaborate on a series of…
"If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable," Carrie Fisher, who died yesterday, at the age of sixty, wrote in her memoir "Wishful Drinking," from 2008. Fisher's…
The Academy Awards officially need a rabbi. How else to navigate the thorny ethics that seem to sprout up each year around the question of separating the artist from the art? Of course, this…
Jane Klain, the indefatigable research manager at the Paley Center for Media, which houses a vast collection of old television and radio programs, goes on archival treasure hunts that someti…
Early in 2010, Cheryl Strayed got an e-mail from an acquaintance, Steve Almond, who wrote an advice column"Dear Sugar"for the literary Web site The Rumpus. Strayed was living in Portland wit…
