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Autumn Leads to Winter Leads Downtown.....
Last week I went downtown again. In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, come winter my colleagues and I would sojourn to South Street Seaport, meet up with some husbands and some kids and shiver as the Big Apple...
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Fall into Winter Performances
Brooklyn Academy of MusicThe last week of November, my friends and I traveled underground to BAM Opera House (rain, rain, rain, but that evening the MTA did its job) for a program by Philip Glass: The...
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The Surprising TFANA Tamburlaine — Still Running Red!
Theatre for a New Audiencecontinues to use its new space at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center well. This time they’ve provided the opportunity to see Marlowe’s Tamburlaine for the first — and presumably...
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Nineteenth Century American theatre on a Twenty-First Century Stage
The cast of An Octoroon is fabulous — funny, sharp, imaginative, courageous. This company is tight, it transforms its delightful costumes into normal apparel, and much of the play is very funny except...
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The Manhattan Project and Oppy
The other night we went down to the 14th Street Y to see a "science" play by Jack Karp called Irreversible, produced by the Red Fern Theatre Company. We left with conflicting feelings -- what a...
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He Walks Again
The most exciting and discouraging aspect of a good production of a 134-year-old play is its timeliness.The Almeida Theatre and Sonia Friedman Productions company has brought HenrikIbsen’s Ghoststo...
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We never tire of Mr. Holmes....
What was it W.C. Fields said — never work with animals or children? Well, despite the concentrated and wonderful work by Ian McKellen as a very lived-in Sherlock Holmes devastated by a failing memory,...
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The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Raised From the Sixties
I always remembered the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. being in black and white. Apparently that was just because we had a black-and-white television set at the time. Well now, it’s the wonderful...
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Not every Phoenix can rise from the ashes
In the rubble that was post-war Berlin, survivors of the war and the camps wander like ghosts looking for the familiar in places and people.“Phoenix” is noir at its darkest, a story of a missing heir,...
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Richard Maxwell's Isolde at TFANA
Opening the fall season at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is the New York City Players’ production of a modern play with a twist on a classical story. Richard...
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Mercury in Retrograde at the Theatre
It was the last week of September, and Mercury was still in retrograde. I had looked forward to my first theatre outings of the BAM Next Wave autumn season. The first production for which we had...
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A Little Shakespeare, Less Pinter
HAMLET at London’s National Theatre, broadcast live around the world and captured in Queens, NY, was thrilling.While no dramaturg was listed in the program or online, he or she had a large influence on...
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Branagh's Return as Actor and Director: This Time I Could See It All
KennethBranagh Theatre Company (Live) broadcast of William Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale”The Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s inaugural season plays Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” in London’s...
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Pericles: The Island Hopper
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, sort of by William Shakespeare, at Theatre for a New Audience (“TFANA”), Polonsky Shakespeare CenterI haven’t seen Pericles, Prince of Tyre in decades, and when I saw the...
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The Van Hove version of Arthur Miller's THE CRUCIBLE
Ivo Van Hove likes to deconstruct texts onstage, putting his stamp on other people’s ideas. This typically means that a 2-hour play will run 3 or even 4 hours because of the extra bulk. The “stamps”...
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Shakespeare – 400 years on
I am behind my time to write about Shakespeare, about the plays, about “what Shakespeare means to me.” I am way behind in my writing in general, so this blog for Will is, perforce, short but I hope...
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Austen’s Story of Lady Susan Translated by Whit Stillman into Film
Love & Friendship is a pretty bit of film. Generally, it is the British — with a few notable exceptions — who make fabulous renderings of Jane Austen novels as feature films and television...
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Who is the Genius?
Genius is the rather ambiguous title of a film about Maxwell Perkins, who was the editor to the works of several American literary geniuses of the first half of the 20th century. It’s based on the...
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Hoping a Limited Run Reappears with Joe Morton as Dick Gregory
Luckily for me, I caught Joe Morton in “Turn Me Loose” during its last week at The Westside Theatre. “Turn Me Loose” is “a play about comic genius Dick Gregory.” Based on how much I laughed for the...
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Pride and Petulance: A Lesser-Known Shakespeare Play on War and Women
It was a perfect summer evening at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. Hot but not stifling. Clear, with enough of a breeze to keep most of the bugs at bay. And a brilliant production on the stage...
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