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Juana Arias / The Washington Post / Getty What Gen Z Knows About Stephen Sondheim
How the late composer’s preoccupation with outsiders has endeared him to a new generation
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Matthew Murphy Decoding the Most Important Songwriter of Our Time
What’s the secret to making great pop music? A Max Martin–inspired musical has some answers.
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David Attie / Getty The Theater World Has Never Understood Lorraine Hansberry
The subversive intent of the playwright’s art and activism has long been underestimated.
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Getty; The Atlantic The 1776 Project
The Broadway revival of the musical means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back to it.
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Simon Annand; The Atlantic The Problem of English Identity
And the play that lays bare Britain’s constructed myths
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Oliver Morris / Getty Stephen Sondheim’s Knotty Vision of Musical Theater
The late composer-lyricist took a calcified medium and made it engage with the human condition.
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Douglas Elbinger / Getty What Stephen Sondheim Knew About Endings
His work was strongest when it lingered in the pain of knowing that no ever after lasts long.
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Universal Pictures When a Hit Musical Becomes a Bad Movie
Dear Evan Hansen was lauded on Broadway, but the film adaptation only emphasizes its flaws.
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Tom Sweeney / Minneapolis Star Tribune / ZUMA … The Unconscious Rebellion of August Wilson
Two new Netflix films, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Giving Voice, honor the late playwright’s rejection of white commercial restrictions.
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Nicholas Hunt / Getty Watching Hamilton Is Like Opening a Time Capsule
Disney+’s filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical feels dated, timeless, and vital all at once.
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Georgian Spring Series by Mark Power/Magnum When Will We Want to Be in a Room Full of Strangers Again?
Theater, an industry full of optimists, is reckoning with a heartbreaking realization.
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George Etheredge / The New York Times Why London’s National Theatre Is Hooking Online Viewers
The intimate camerawork of its web broadcasts gives everyone the best seat in the house.
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Kathy Willens / AP Shakespeare Wrote His Best Works During a Plague
The qualities for which live theater is celebrated—audiences responding with laughter, tears, gasps, and coughs—accelerate its danger. But the Broadway shutdown could be good for plays.
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Jan Versweyveld Why West Side Story Abandoned Its Queer Narrative
A new revival shows that the musical is still bound by ethnic stereotypes, and that it would work best by returning to its origins.
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Naomi Elliott A Pop-Culture Time Capsule of the 2010s
The 27 works, moments, and objects that define the best—and worst—of the past decade
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Julieta Cervantes A New Way of Looking at To Kill a Mockingbird
The Broadway adaptation’s writer and star—Aaron Sorkin and Ed Harris, respectively—talk about updating and paying homage to Harper Lee’s American classic today.
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Matt Humphrey The Nostalgic End of Fleabag
As the groundbreaking show concludes with a final theater run in London, audiences are left to grapple with its meaning.
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Walter McBride / Contributor The Man Who Transformed Broadway
The legendary producer Hal Prince prevailed through changing tastes and times, and helped pioneer the creation of the “concept musical.”
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Alessandra Mello / Berkeley Repertory Theatre The Tony-Nominated Play That Savages the U.S. Constitution
Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me appears to tout radical change, but it stops just short of being revolutionary.
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Joan Marcus When the U.S. Constitution Is the Source Material for Your One-Woman Play
Heidi Schreck’s Tony-nominated Broadway show is as “messy” and full of contradictions as the founding document itself.
