After twenty years as The New Yorker’s chief theatre critic, John Lahr will give up regular reviewing to focus on the Profiles he also contributes to the magazine, as well as on book projects.
Lahr joined The New Yorker in 1992, and, over the past two decades, he has written around a million published words for the magazine. Lahr comes from a family of performers: his mother was a Ziegfeld girl, and his father, Bert Lahr, was the lion in “The Wizard of Oz.” As a critic, he has expanded the range and scope of The New Yorker’s theatre reviews, taking them in an exciting, participatory direction. Tony Kushner, the writer of “Angels in America”—and of this month’s “Lincoln”—opined, “There’s never been an American critic like John Lahr. His writing exalts, honors, and dignifies the profession and, more importantly, the art.” Woody Allen said of Lahr, “Where were you when I was growing up?”
Lahr’s work for the magazine is too varied to recap. He’s written Profiles of Woody Allen and Sharon Stone, of Ingmar Bergman and Eddie Izzard, of Judi Dench, Steve Buscemi, Helen Mirren, and Sir Ian McKellen. Below are links to some of Lahr’s favorite pieces that he has written for the magazine.
Reviews
Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (1992):
High on a hill in downtown Los Angeles, the thirty-six-year-old playwright Tony Kushner stood watching an usher urge the people outside the Mark Taper Forum to take their seats for the opening of “Angels in America,” his two-part “gay fantasia on national themes”…. Kushner has not written a gay problem play, or agitprop Storm and Schlong; nor is he pleading for tolerance. “I think that’s a terrible thing to be looking for,” he told me. Instead, with immense good humor and accessible characters, he honors the gay community by telling a story that sets its concerns in the larger historical context of American political life.
Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” (1995):
“Arcadia” uses intellectual argument as a kind of riptide to pull the audience under the playful surface of romance…. In “Arcadia” ’s comic conceit, seismic intellectual shifts are treated as superficial, while superficial changes of the heart are treated as monumental. For the evening to work, the audience must feel the pull of sexuality as well as the play of knowledge.
Mike Nichols’s “Death of a Salesman” (2012):
[Philip Seymour] Hoffman [is] an eloquent package of virulence and vulnerability…. Gravity seems to hang on his lumpy body like a rumpled suit, tethering him to the shaky ground he stands on.
Liza Minelli at the Palace:
The day I saw the show, after each of the nineteen songs on the playlist, people in the orchestra seats jumped to their feet to cheer the diminutive dynamo. “You’re fabulous!” “We love you!” voices called from the darkness. “Don’t you ever, ever think that I don’t know I’m up here because of you,” she replied, pandering and picking their pockets at the same time. (Seats cost up to a hundred and twenty-six dollars.) In one song, written especially for the show, Minelli promises her audience, “I would never leave you”—a truly terrifying piece of show-biz flimflammery. In fact, what she means to say is the opposite: Please don’t leave me.
Profiles
Roseanne Barr (1995):
Once upon a time, in 1985, Johnny Carson introduced the freshest new comic voice on the Los Angeles comedy-club scene, a thirty-two-year-old Denver housewife, to his “Tonight Show” audience. Backstage, before going on, the comedienne opened a letter she’d written to herself years before, when she’d imagine this moment of triumph. Part of it said, “This is the beginning of your life, for She who is and is not yet.” Then Carson said “Please welcome Roseanne Barr!” and the nation took its first look at the radical feminist disguised as a faux naïf who would become an iconoclast the likes of which had never been seen before on TV.
