New York Magazine’s editor-in-chief David Haskell and Vulture editor Neil Janowitz today announced that Sara Holdren will return as theater critic for Vulture and the print magazine. Holdren, an accomplished director and teacher, previously served as New York’s theater critic from 2017 to 2019, during which period she received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and American Theatre magazine subsequently called her “the indispensable voice the theatre didn’t know it needed.” At New York, she also published outstanding interviews with a variety of theater-makers, including Heidi Schreck, Tony Kushner, and Ivo van Hove.
Holdren will join critic Jackson McHenry, who will continue to review theater in addition to writing features and news. This marks a significant expansion of New York and Vulture’s already formidable criticism and coverage of Broadway and beyond. In addition to redoubling our critical reach and muscle power, we will soon revive Stage Whisperer, the theater newsletter that had a test run during the 2022 Tony Awards season.
“Sara’s first two years as theater critic was, you might argue, the most exciting show on Broadway: an electric debut of a singular talent whose experience making theater was in fertile tension with her critical writing,” says Haskell. “How lucky are we that, after a few years of deepening her directing practice, she has chosen to return to criticism? The New York theater community will be much richer for her and Jackson’s substantial and engaged coverage, on Vulture and in the magazine.”
Holdren, originally from the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia, is the co-founder of the theater project Tiltyard, and in 2019–2020, she served as the Artistic Director of Shakespeare Academy @ Stratford. Her directing work includes Cymbeline (NYU Grad Acting Program); three iterations of MIDSUMMER, an original piece that she co-adapted from the plays of Shakespeare; Three Sisters (Two River Theater); As You Like It (SUNY Purchase); and more. She is a Drama League Fellow and a graduate of the Acting Shakespeare program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and has been both a mentor and a lead artist at the Mercury Store as well as artistic director of the Yale Summer Cabaret. Sara has also taught at the Einhorn School of the Performing Arts at Primary Stages and the New School. She holds a B.A. in Theater and an M.F.A. in directing, both from Yale University.
She joins a uniquely accomplished group of arts writers. New York’s criticism has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for Andrea Long Chu (Criticism, 2023) and Jerry Saltz (Criticism, 2018), and Justin Davidson and Craig Jenkins have been named Pulitzer finalists (Criticism, 2020 and 2021). Davidson additionally won a Pulitzer Prize in Criticism at Newsday in 2002.