167 stories by "Hilton Als"
In 2007, the theatre artists and activists Katie Cappiello and Meg McInerney founded the Arts Effect All-Girl Theatre Company. There, the directors provided a forum for teen-age girls, where…
Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on famil…
The language around Christmas is usually pretty treacly, as befits the season. But future writers should remember that one of the amazing things about the holiday's ur-text, Charles Dickens'…
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…
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 …
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…
The Public Theatre is currently hosting two inspired, cogent artists from different cultures, whose distance from each other is bridged by Josephine Baker's butt. Upstairs, near the administ…
To watch Larry David make his Broadway début, in his self-penned "Fish in the Dark" (at the Cort), in the same week that Helen Mirren stars as Queen Elizabeth II, in Peter Morgan's "The Aud…
For fifteen years, the actor Jim Fletcher has worked with the important theatre director and writer Richard Maxwell, whose shows require an uncommon degree of silence from the performers. In…
There is so much good will and enthusiasm these days among theatregoers who have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda's complicated, valuable musical "Hamilton" (directed by Thomas Kail, at the Public) t…
While most ten-best lists are posted at the end of the year, I prefer to send mine along at the beginning, when the world, culturally at least, is still a bit of a tabula rasa, and one's min…
In the repertory company of my mind, Bernard Pomerance's 1977 play, "The Elephant Man" (now in its first Broadway revival since 2002, at the Booth), would rotate with a number of other drama…
A black man can't catch a break, even in a freak show. As Jake in "Side Show" (at the St. James), the mighty actor and singer David St. Louis feels protective of Violet and Daisy Hilton (the…
The director John Rando's crap sentimentality undermines so much of what should be interesting about "On the Town" (now in revival, at the Lyric) that you spend at least half of your time du…
"Generations" (at the SoHo Rep) is not even an hour long, but it is filled with so much warmth and thought that the feeling it imparts lasts for a long time after you've left the theatre. St…
I don’t know which casting directors first took notice of the great American actress Cherry Jones, but they must have had an interest in what I call spiritual casting. More often than …
The performances I loved best had less to do with her righteous indomitability than with the artistic wizardry she could spin.
Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s new revival of “Macbeth” covers the same old territory.
I’m afraid it was the limited, prejudiced part of my nature that prevented me from acknowledging, before now, the writer and performer Edgar Oliver and his emotionally grand work. Alth…
Kate Valk is an interesting theatrical figure, one of the greatest the American stage has produced in the last forty or so years. Yet she is largely unknown if you don’t get to see the…
When it comes to technique, actors know what you might call one another’s family secrets. They know what goes into creating a sustained stage illusion, and how to make a scene partner …
Richard Maxwell is one of the more adventurous theatre artists that this country has produced in decades.
Diane Arbus knew from freaks. But the photographer was never derogatory toward her subjects—all those circus performers, overdone drag queens, and angry young men she framed with such …
Style, when it works, can be a startling and pleasurable thing. But the American response to it is often complicated. It’s not unusual for one’s fellow-citizens to resist imagina…
Long ago, in the late nineteen-seventies, when I treated Manhattan like one big discothèque, or the glittery gritty mirrored universe in “A Chorus Line,” I also went to part…
