240 stories by "Michael Schulman"
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…
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…
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…
Broadway and football: it was only a matter of time before someone put the two together.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
At their best, the Tony Awards dance like nobody’s watching.
Among the trends on Broadway this season: musicals about sixties girl rockers (Janis Joplin, Carole King); bravura performances by men in drag (Neil Patrick Harris, Mark Rylance); and raw eg…
Shakespeare’s women, Harold Bloom has observed, are always marrying down. Is Orlando truly worthy of Rosalind, with her panoptic wit? How does Viola wind up with that ninny Orsino? Per…
LaTanya Richardson Jackson is honored by a roomful of star-powered women.
Two aspiring trampoliners arrived the other day at Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM), a fitness and dance studio in Williamsburg, described by its founder, Elizabeth Streb, as a “b…
It’s not often that a single member of the audience commands more attention than the action onstage.
The new documentary “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me” shows its eighty-nine-year-old subject’s ferocious dual nature.
Somewhere in the bowels of the Belasco Theatre, long considered to be haunted by its namesake, the actor Mark Rylance has installed a Ping-Pong table. “I like to encourage a playful pl…
I sat directly behind Stephen Sondheim at a performance of “Fun Home,” a new musical at the Public.
Since Janis Joplin died, in the fall of 1970, her younger siblings, Laura and Michael Joplin, have jointly watched over her estate.
By the time Vickie Lynn Hogan was twenty-six, she had made a name for herself, having modelled for Guess jeans and appeared on the cover of Playboy. The name was Anna Nicole Smith. A native …
“Chicago” captures something canny about the metabolism of fame and about the symbiosis between criminals and the hankering public.
The sixty-seventh annual Antoinette Perry Awards were handed out last night, and they began with Neil Patrick Harris dissing Shia LaBeouf. (“I wouldn’t be here if someone else ha…
Sunlight gleams over the savannah. The cicadas are descending on “Mamma Mia.” June is busting out all over, and, as Leslie Uggams once sang, the lidda bidda drigdes and the hucka…
If most of its promises ended up, well, smashed, the show’s two seasons still offered a Minnelli of delights (it’s like a flock of seagulls) for theatre lovers, who regarded it w…
