Monday, October 17, 2016
Some actresses prefer to meet a journalist for the first time with a press agent in tow; some opt for the neutrality of a restaurant; some suggest the distracting hubbub of the sound stage. …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, May 25, 2015
Thursday, March 19, 2015
In an extract from Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh – winner of the 2015 Sheridan Morley prize for theatre biography – John Lahr revisits the runaway success of The Glass …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:33AMFriday, November 21, 2014
Mike Nichols died yesterday at the age of eighty-three. For those who knew and loved him—I count myself among them—his passing is no ordinary loss. Mike was inimitable. The son of a Whit…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:24PMFriday, July 18, 2014
Monday, March 24, 2014
By nine-thirty in the morning on Martin Luther King Day, a blustery Arctic wind had emptied West Forty-second Street of most pedestrians, but on the neon-lit fourth floor of the New 42nd Str…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMWednesday, February 26, 2014
In this archive piece, originally published on 9 March 1994, John Lahr reflects on the US comedian's brand of intellectual anarchyBill Hicks, one of the most daring American stand-up comedia…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:59AMBill Hicks died 20 years ago today. In this obituary, published in the Guardian in 1994, John Lahr reflects on the US comedian's brand of intellectual anarchyBill Hicks, one of the most dari…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:59AMWednesday, December 11, 2013
Barry Humphries is hanging up Edna’s diamante glasses and her size-9 high heels after this farewell tour.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:31PMWednesday, October 9, 2013
John Tiffany’s dashing, well-cast revival of “The Glass Menagerie” misses the central emotional point of the drama.
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In a good theatregoing year, you’re lucky to get one production of such exhilarating high quality; this year, I got two—Clifford Odets’s “Golden Boy” and Mike N…
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"With me it is simple: what I am I can write,” Clifford Odets said. When the thirty-one-year-old playwright sat down, in 1937, to write a new play to bankroll the foundering Group …
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8220;Playwriting is a young man’s and, of late, a young woman’s game,” David Mamet said, in 2005. “Most playwrights’ best work is probably their earliest. Those…
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Christopher Durang’s theatrical specialty is a kind of gleeful comic exaggeration that falls somewhere between farce and satire, between mischief and mayhem, in that territory that Che…
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In the lobby of the Palace Theatre, where “Annie” is having a listless revival (under the direction of James Lapine), the Toddler Dreams Shirt (“Dreams Do Come True”)…
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In one of the major avant-garde performances of the late nineteen-sixties, the actors of the Living Theatre used to run almost naked through startled Off Broadway audiences, bleating about n…
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8220;I think this is the most truly autobiographic play Williams ever wrote,” Elia Kazan said of Tennessee Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth,” which he staged on Broadw…
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Enter Nick Payne, a stripling British playwright at the beginning of a great career. Still in his twenties, Payne exudes none of his generation’s glib nihilism. His voice is quiet and …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, July 30, 2012
In every strapped corner of Britain these days, when two or three people are gathered together, the talk is of banks, bailouts, and bonuses. Money is short; tales of greed are long. Nicholas…
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In “As You Like It,” Shakespeare’s celebration and sendup of the pastoral, written in 1600, his crew of cast-out characters wander into the Forest of Arden, a place whose n…
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If you're betting on this year's Tonys, Broadway's annual cavalcade of champions, keep it right here on the New Yorker Web site. Besides knowing the course-I won one in 2002-I also fancy…
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8220;The humorous story is strictly a work of art,—high and delicate art,—and only an artist can tell it,” Mark Twain wrote. Will Eno’s “Title and Deed” (…
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Before its format was gobbled up by television, in the early sixties, the revue was the bonne bouche of American musical theatre. “The Great American Revue,” a vivacious, well-cu…
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Let’s imagine for a minute that you are a director and you’re unhappy with one of Tennessee Williams’s great plays. If you went to one of the archives where reams of his d…
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In a review of the 1904 début production of J. M. Barrie’s play “Peter Pan,” the British critic Max Beerbohm wrote, “Mr. Barrie is not that rare creature, a man …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMIf you stand on London’s Waterloo Bridge, overlooking the Thames as it carries the dust of the ages toward the sea, you will find yourself in one of the most strategic spots in Great B…
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In the first beat of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" (now in a luminous revival, directed by Mike Nichols, at the Ethel Barrymore), the salesman Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) tr…
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According to Edward Albee, the title of his 1980 play “The Lady from Dubuque” (in revival at the Signature Theatre Company, under the skillful direction of David Esbjornson) owe…
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