Polly Stenham’s updating of Strindberg’s Miss Julie moves the action to contemporary London, and finds both contempt and sympathy for this new version of the idle rich. But, shorn of its 19th-century context, the play struggles to make the class transgression feel … Continue reading
The actor talks In the Heights and Dreamgirls. Read my full BroadwayWorld interview here
“I shook up the world.” So says young gun and new heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (shortly to become Muhammad Ali) in those heady moments after his shock defeat of Sonny Liston in February 1964. But a meeting that same night … Continue reading
The current racial crisis in America might seem too urgent, too horrific, for us to be constantly seeking historical stories, but Suzan-Lori Parks’s play cycle makes a vividly articulate case for the long thread running from 19th-century slavery to 2016 debate … Continue reading
Family is the ideal, the necessity, the burden and the war zone of Nathaniel Martello-White’s intricate new play, alternately elusive and confrontational. It’s group therapy – Ultz provides the community hall plastic chairs and tea table – with no safeguards, … Continue reading
Racial politics, addiction, violence and economic hardship. The subject matter of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical, based on Edna Ferber’s sprawling novel, shocked on its 1927 premiere, as did its integrated story and score and revolutionary dramatic heft. … Continue reading
“Murder is hilarious,” quips Zawe Ashton’s scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd’s high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet’s radical 1947 play, it really is. It’s also lurid, strange, bleak and powerfully transcendent, as befits a piece that locates hunger … Continue reading
Lolita Chakrabarti’s impassioned debut has only gained topicality since its 2012 Tricycle incarnation. Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses and #OscarsSoWhite, among others, have fanned its flames, while quips about a paranoid Russian regime and the limits of English … Continue reading
Joshua Harmon’s provocative 2012 piece is the Rocky of comedies. His evenly matched sparring partners, a pair of viscerally antagonistic cousins confined in close quarters after a familial loss, bruise, bludgeon and literally draw blood. The bonds of kinship have … Continue reading
