1,898 stories from The New Yorker
The theatre has the power"more like the prerogative"to warp reality to suit its own ends, exiting the literal world through whatever trapdoors it creates. Why does an angel crash through a g…
The veteran photographer James Welling has long used architecture as a source of inspiration, beginning with images of Los Angeles, in the late seventies, and continuing through his pictures…
In October, the publisher Hogarth rolled out the first in its ambitious new line of Shakespeare plays retold by contemporary novelists. The pairings are promising: Margaret Atwood, a master …
Jonah Levy, a thirty-year-old trumpet player based in Los Angeles, has lately developed a curious weekend routine. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, he puts on a white shirt, a black tie, bla…
Of the choreographer Agnes de Mille it has been said that she was a better writer than she was a choreographer. That's not the way she planned it. She made twenty-one ballets and the dances …
Michael Flatley is retiring! This is terrible news. But you can see why he'd want to go home. He started Irish step dancing when he was eleven, as he was growing up on Chicago's South Side, …
On a recent Thursday evening, a small crowd gathered in a sweaty upstairs room in a Lutheran church in Bed Stuy for "Mariposa and the Saint," a short play composed entirely from the text of …
Robert O'Hara's new play, "Barbecue" (directed with vigor and understanding by Kent Gash, at the Public), is my idea of an American classic, or the kind of classic we need. Although its fecu…
When Tony Kushner's "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches" opened on Broadway, in 1993, in a production directed by George C. Wolfe, the play ended with a winged angel crashing into a dy…
Hillary Clinton is, so far, the only declared Presidential candidate known to have seen "Hamilton": she attended a performance of the show at the Public Theatre, in March, to which she respo…
Nine years before "Hamilton," the 2006 musical "Spring Awakening" gave the American stage a fresh sound. Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's adaptation of the 1891 Frank Wedekind drama set the r…
Movie stars crash-landing on Broadway seems de rigueur, but last season "Fun Home" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" led the pack without famous names. This fall, star …
One of the pleasures of the portrait-in-greatness podcast""WTF with Marc Maron" and many dozens of others, multiplying all the time"is the dual presentation of culture and character, the ins…
South African scientists have discovered that 400-year-old tobacco pipes excavated from the garden of William Shakespeare contained cannabis, suggesting the playwright might have written som…
I first heard the poet and comedian Lord Buckley's sui-generis, incredible music-as-talk during a dance performance by Karole Armitage. This was a number of years ago, but sometimes, when I …
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…
E. L. Doctorow died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was eighty-four. Widely celebrated for his often formally adventurous historical novels""The Book of Daniel," "Ragtime," "Billy Bathgate,"Å
"A Dynamic Home for Artists and New Music of All Kinds," the home page says on the Web site for National Sawdust, a cutting-edge venue in Williamsburg that opens, after much anticipation,…
I want to say a special word about Dave Malloy's "Preludes," because it is the work of an artist who is not afraid to try things, or to create worlds that haven't necessarily been seen befor…
In 1727, a writer and editor named Lewis Theobald was preparing to unveil "Double Falsehood," a tragicomedy that he said was based on manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare. "The good old…
Movies change over the years. Decades ago, I saw "Grey Gardens" as a story of a festering delusion of the American aristocracy and the closed circles of high society decaying into inanition …
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…
In the late nineteen-nineties, Elise Engler asked an upstairs neighbor a vexing philosophical question: Is a safety pin a thing? Engler is an artist, and she was working on a sequence of dra…
Telling it like it was and wasn't.
"Woman Before a Glass"; "Primo"; "Orson's Shadow."
