Michael Appler

regional managing editor - United States - New York

Michael Appler is a theater journalist, playwright, and cultural studies scholar in New York City with degrees in Journalism and American Studies from Fordham University. His writing has appeared largely in the Village Voice and the Fordham Observer, where his theater criticism helped to create the most active theater desk at any college paper in the country. His scholarly research has focused on racial performance in the music of Janis Joplin, as well as the countercultural projects of the late-1960s and early-1970s American musical. He has worked as a professional musical director at regional theaters across the New York area, and his current playwriting project, Letters To The Editor, looks to dramatize the American sexual revolution through the letter-writing communities of Penthouse Magazine.

“City of No Illusions” Takes Refugees to the Border of Life and Death

Posted by Michael Appler | 16th Feb 2019 | New York, Review, Theatre and Politics, United States of America

“City of No Illusions,” a political comedy that stages the modern refugee crisis inside a funeral home.

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “Choir Boy,” Fearless and Faithful, Makes Radiant Broadway Debut

Posted by Michael Appler | 4th Feb 2019 | LGBTQ Theatre, New York, Review, United States of America

“Choir Boy” is itself a spiritual whose song, sung triumphantly by the bountiful talent of its leading star, Jeremy Pope, rises from its stage with the same faith and fearlessness of a prayer sung only for the stars.

Gilded in Glitter, How Much Jukebox Inferno Can “The Cher Show” Take?

Posted by Michael Appler | 2nd Feb 2019 | Musical Theatre, New York, Review, United States of America

Cher, the Academy, Grammy and Emmy Award winning superstar, could never be contained in a Broadway...

In “The Making of King Kong,” a Hallucinatory Descent Into the American Imagination

Posted by Michael Appler | 3rd Dec 2018 | New York, Review, Theatre and Politics, United States of America

Claire, though wrapped in the scrappy, eccentric volatility of experimental theater, is a challenging and provoking playwright, smart and admirably critical—hilarious, too.

Tom Stoppard’s “The Hard Problem” Looks for Humanity in Human Consciousness

Posted by Michael Appler | 20th Nov 2018 | New York, Review, United States of America

Stoppard has sought to lower the stage into the depths of the human mind, endeavoring to see the theater as a proxy for human consciousness, an outlet whose own bizarre corruptions of life are but well-directed reflections of our own conscious turmoil.

“The Prom” Is a Celebratory Trumpian Footloose When We Need It Most

Posted by Michael Appler | 15th Nov 2018 | Musical Theatre, New York, Review, United States of America

Maybe “The Prom’s” greatest success, in all of its glitter and be gay, is a validation that splashy, garish musical comedies, themselves no champion of political correctness, can still be made from scratch. “The Prom,” exceptionally original yet cradled by tradition, is proof that bursting into jazz hands when someone puts you down is still a worthy prescription for joy.

At LCT, “Plot Points In Our Sexual Development” Traces the Edges of Queer Intimacy

Posted by Michael Appler | 8th Nov 2018 | LGBTQ Theatre, New York, Review, United States of America

Queer spaces, Miranda Rose Hall suggests, are uniquely suited to plot the points of sexual development, to explore the dynamic, malleable nature of identity. Queer sex not as negotiation or imitation, but as creation and innovation.

“The Ferryman” Steers Us to the Crossroads of Family and Myth, History and Tradition

Posted by Michael Appler | 8th Nov 2018 | New York, Review, United States of America

Beyond the guises of harvest festivity, more sinister fates are at work. Holy vows have been broken. Betrayals and tragic sin done. Promises not made, innocent slain and wars unwon.

“Torch Song” Breathes New Life, Radiantly Led By Michael Urie

Posted by Michael Appler | 8th Nov 2018 | LGBTQ Theatre, New York, Review, United States of America

You may find that this glorious Broadway revival, led by Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl in the same theater where it opened over 35 years ago, burns a softer flame — no less bright, for sure, but perhaps a bit more tender, lit for a time when a drag queen poised before a Broadway audience, while no less political, is imaginably less avant-garde.

“Eve’s Song” Makes An Ambitious Attempt at Tackling Family and Violence in Black America

Posted by Michael Appler | 7th Nov 2018 | New York, Review, United States of America

While Eve’s Song hopes to confront systemic issues of violence and race in America, it looks to do so amidst the microscopic setting of the family table — not a microcosm of these problems but an island that seeks to distance itself from them.

In “Midsummer” The Mobile Unit Delivers a Joyous Celebration of Life and Shakespeare

Posted by Michael Appler | 1st Nov 2018 | New York, Review, United States of America

Joe Papp would be proud had he lived to see what his Mobile Theater had become: a brimming, joyous sanctuary of inclusivity and plurality, of Shakespearean excellence armed with subtle and striking mindfulness, no longer a struggling caravan of the American theater’s earliest pioneers, but a rag-tag group of brilliant players all the same.