MICHAEL APPLER, Staff Writer
All content by MICHAEL APPLER
February 1, 2019
“Choir Boy,” first presented at Manhattan Theatre Company in 2013, is not simply a musical play — it is itself a spiritual whose song, sung triumphantly by the bountiful talent of its leading star, Jeremy Pope, rises from its stage.
January 23, 2019
“Awake” has evolved into a nine-scene collection of conversations on race, sexism, gun violence and immigration.
December 6, 2018
If the makers of “The Cher Show,” among whom the real Cher is a producer, thought the pure divadom of its subject, dressed in all the gloriously gay, sequined and campy stylings of our favorite dark lady, could save the bio-musical from itself, they were holdin’ out for love.
December 3, 2018
It’s not hard to guess why the Barrow Group may have asked Moran to again surface “The Tricky Part.” But to come to “The Tricky Part” expecting our contemporary social sentience to jolt this play into some electric consciousness is naive.
December 2, 2018
The satire at the heart of Lisa Clair’s “The Making of King Kong,” presented by Target Margin Theater, is not aimed at that famed monster himself. If anything, Kong is the most reasonable being in the room.
November 20, 2018
“We need to live first of all; to believe in what makes us live and that something ‘makes’ us live — to believe that whatever is produced from the mysterious depths of ourselves need not forever haunt us as an exclusively digestive concern,” Artaud told us, jokingly.
November 15, 2018
“The Prom” may very well be the musical comedy sensation of this Broadway season — its story of four clueless, Indiana-bound Broadway divas, determined (though misguided in their efforts) to help a small-town lesbian banned from her prom, too tempting of a political carrot for a Broadway community starving for witty political humor and the warm embrace of an indulgent Broadway musical.
November 15, 2018
You’ll need to fight through dense brambles of code and programming, sort through the clamor of social media’s infinite cacophony, to find the heart of The Public’s “Wild Goose Dreams.” Make...
November 9, 2018
“Plot Points in Our Sexual Development” — stashed away in the secluded interior of the Claire Tow Theater, the smallest of Lincoln Center’s venues, modest enough in size that you can hear yourself...
November 9, 2018
Pay close attention and you’ll find that “The Ferryman” is washed in the holy waters of classic literature.
Macbeth and the Eleusinian Mysteries, Virgil and Sir Walter Raleigh, Sophocles and...
November 9, 2018
I don’t need to tell you that “Torch Song” is brilliantly funny, nor do I need to mention that “Torch Song” will make you cry, that its meditation on family and belonging will send you deep into...
November 7, 2018
“Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future” is a lesson, a study, really, in the very making of folk tradition, of oral history told through song.
November 7, 2018
Most of “Eve's Song,” The Public Theater’s world premiere by resident playwright Patricia Ione Lloyd, is spent around a table, and that’s because “Eve's Song” is the story of an American family.
November 7, 2018
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is an explosion of joy and laughter, bewitched by a cast of New Yorkers dedicated to the art of translation, to the task of bringing the wonderful absurdities of Shakespearean comedy to audiences of diverse providence, and the brightest example of The Public Theater’s founding mission.
August 5, 2018
Why do we stare at the David? What is it about that seventeen-foot-tall Michelangelo that so transfixes, spellbinds the human eye and stops it, frozen by some Olympian opiate, before that dwarfing marble...
June 29, 2018
Log cabins are man-made. They’re visibly intertwined, tangled structures forged by forcing lumber together into sturdy joints. Neat, organized and well-built to the eye, only air separates the sinews...
June 23, 2018
Little more than a century and a half separates the present from American chattel slavery, only six decades from American segregation. No American tradition has more permanently defined life for inhabitants...
June 22, 2018
That Shakespearean insult “you are a Senator” fell with extra weight during last Saturday’s performance of the Public Theater’s “Othello.” The senior senator from New York, Chuck Schumer, sat...
June 6, 2018
For better or for worse, there are times when theater comes dangerously close to reality, when imitation may brush too close for comfort and break the skin. Realism comes at a price.
Audiences of “Peace...
May 31, 2018
Inside the Brooklyn Academy of Music lies a dismantling of your childhood – not its destruction, by any means, but a subtle, unsettling excavation of its innocence, of those fairy-bound delusions we...
May 21, 2018
The ground does shake in the course interior of New York Theater Workshop’s East Village house. It rattles and convulses with the brandished shudders of revolution, and its floorboards tremor with every...
May 7, 2018
As nomination day quickly recedes into the distance, so begins the heart of Tony campaign season, a month of cut-throat competition, flattery and persuasion as nominated shows endeavor to woo Tony voters,...
May 1, 2018
There is a distinct, delightful feeling that sails through the audience of a show as beloved as “My Fair Lady,” a collective sigh of nostalgia that hushes the theater as classic ballads of love and...
May 1, 2018
Stephen Sondheim told us that children will listen, that they’ll see and that they’ll learn. Somehow, these are the words that hung in my mind as I departed “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,”...
April 25, 2018
It’s in the eyes. From the safety of the audience—removed if only slightly from the wrenching, tour-de-force performance given by three-time Tony Award nominee Condola Rashad in George Bernard Shaw’s...
April 23, 2018
There comes a time in your experience of “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” — and hopefully it arrives sometime before cascades of glitter rain down into the audience in a disco explosion, sometime...
April 21, 2018
What is on the exterior a well-choreographed dance, a story of that careful circling two people madly in love must make before convincing each other of their devotion, is in truth an all-out battle for...
April 12, 2018
At the heart of Jack O’Brien’s new production of Rodger and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” is the fundamental question of revival. Is the act of revival a feat of seduction? Is it an embellished, grandiose...
April 10, 2018
“The Lucky Ones” is a show like springtime, like finding a fresh plot of dirt and digging your hands deep into it, like breathing in the earth and holding it up to your face because it is new and because...
April 8, 2018
Had there been any doubt that the comedic genius of Tina Fey could not seamlessly carry to the Broadway stage, a new medium for the veteran comedy writer of “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock,”...
March 20, 2018
Jessie Mueller is a vocal chameleon. For her 2014 transformation into Carole King in the award-winning broadway musical, “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” Mueller took home a Tony Award for Best...
January 8, 2018
When the dark of night comes and the people take to the streets, the blackness beneath the clouds saturates with certain and distinct bursts of color. And in the many days and months following the 9th...
December 17, 2016
“Get Up On The Get Down” is available for purchase online at the Avenue 8's website.
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