On a recent weeknight in midtown Manhattan, the Broadway actor Kelvin Moon Loh led a rehearsal of "The Mikado," one of the most popular works by the nineteenth-century duo W. S. Gilber…
Ruth Draper was born in New York in 1884. When she was very young, she entertained her siblings by sitting on a window seat in the nursery of her family's brownstone, on East Forty-seventh S…
August Wilson's life work was his "Century Cycle," a ten-play portrait of black life in Pittsburgh's Hill District, each set in a different decade. ("Fences," the nineteen-fifties entry, is …
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…
Simon McBurney has two phones. In his dressing room at the Golden Theatre, on Broadway, they're both ringing. He cuts off one call, answers the other, then apologizes, scans his messages, an…
When Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart put together the musical "Lady in the Dark," in 1940, Freud was big. The great man's thinking had yet to come under wide attack, and psychoanalys…
The director Damien Chazelle's notion of artistic power isn't merely inseparable from his notion of will power; it's the very embodiment of it"louder, faster, and alone are his standards of …
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…
Onstage & off Plunkett's ability to inhabit & portray experience has an almost tactile, corporeal quality. Her performances have the kind of intelligence & emotional range that prods an audi…
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…
Boy meets girl, stuck in a traffic jam, and honks at her. Girl gives boy the finger. Boy drives on. Boy meets girl again, in a bar, and brushes past. Girl thinks boy is a jerk. Boy meets gir…
Oscar winners aren't the best barometers by which to gauge the national mood. Movies and politics work at different speeds, reshaping themselves"and absorbing each other"in unpredictable bur…
Jason Sudeikis sat at the back of the Bowery Poetry Club, waiting for open-mike night to begin. He had parked his black Vespa outside, having motored in from Clinton Hill, where he lives wit…
Throughout his career, James Baldwin had a hankering to work in show business. Like Henry James, one of his early heroes, Baldwin loved the footlights; early on, with his friend and editor S…
In the immediate aftermath of the Presidential election, as it became necessary to process an appalling new reality"What does this mean for the undocumented? What does this mean for women? W…
Dear Vice-President-elect Pence,
It's an odd fact of "Othello" that Iago has more lines than the title character. But inconspicuousness"the ability to keep his own name out of the spotlight while cruelly manipulating events…
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…
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…
The twenty-three-year-old actor Ben Platt, known for his adorkable role in the "Pitch Perfect" movies, delivers a deeper portrait of nerd angst in "Dear Evan Hansen," a new musical by Benj P…
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…
A week ago, Lady Gaga released her fifth album, “Joanne,” which has a stripped-down sound that is quite different from her previous efforts. She has promoted the album with pe…
The network-TV pop musical, usually performed live, has picked up steam in recent years, with unnerving results. Watching Christopher Walken fop sleepily through "Hook's Tango" or Carrie Und…
"Michael Moore in TrumpLand" isn't quite the film that I expected it to be, and that's all to the good. Moore is, of course, a genius of political satire, deploying his persona"as a populist…
If there is a plaque commemorating the location of the entrance to Alfred Ely Beach's pneumatic railway, built in secret below 265 Broadway, in lower Manhattan, the writer Sam Lubell and I d…