Is Anything More American Than Oklahoma! in Oklahoma?

Forget Broadway's Reopening—The Nation's Artistic Heartbeat Is at Its Center

If there’s a more rambunctious and promiscuous genre than musical theater, I haven’t met it yet.

Musicals are an everywhere phenomenon. They touch an enormously broad swath of American lives, unapologetically building worlds that don’t yet exist. I see this commitment to the not-yet as an aspiration for the rest of us stuck living in the here-and-now.

I recently wrote a book about musicals, and visited communities in the heartland that were using musical theater to help understand their place in this country. I watched an original musical about Samson and Delilah …

The Black Ambition of A Raisin in the Sun | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

The Black Ambition of A Raisin in the Sun

Revisiting Lorraine Hansberry’s Most Famous Play in the Wake of the Open Letter to White American Theater

When the curtains open on Lorraine Hansberry’s most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, we see Ruth Younger bustling about a claustrophobic Chicago kitchenette: waking her loved ones, cooking, …

Why Broadway Meanders up Manhattan’s Grid

New York's Most Iconic Street Grew Organically From Colonial Cowpath Into an Allegorical Strand

I first saw Broadway from the air. It was 1990 and I was flying with my architecture class from the University of Florida up to Boston so we could learn …

Let’s Not Pretend That ‘Hamilton’ Is History

America's Founders Have Never Enjoyed More Sex Appeal, but the Hit Musical Cheats Audiences by Making Democracy Look Easy

Hamilton is the hottest show on Broadway, filled with hip-hop songs, R&B rhythms, and tri-cornered hats. Its multi-racial cast portrays the pantheon of Revolutionary greats, and for many a starry-eyed …