recent posts
- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
- William S. Burroughs/ Nova ’78 at MoMA/ Remembering James Grauerholz
- Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights: Monster Mash
- Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod
- Now on Oscar’s Short List: Holding Liat, a Documentary about the Harrowing Wait for a Hostage Freed from Gaza
Category: Theater
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Oh for the days when “Trigger” was simply the name of Roy Rogers’ horse. In Safe Space, a new play by Alan Fox and under Jack O’Brien’s deft direction, in its final performances at Bay Street Theater, “trigger” is that plucked from the headlines buzzword for inciting a sensitivity—any psychological, cultural, relevant sore spot– it…
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Sylvia Miles passed away today at 94. She always said she would not leave this earth without her academy award but sad, to report, that she did. A two-time nominee for just minutes of screen time in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Farewell My Lovely (1975), Sylvia was a New York actress who would not relocate…
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Not so long ago, having dinner with a friend at Café Un Deux Trois, a stone’s throw from the Belasco Theater where Network was doing brisk business, I could see the actor Tony Goldwyn on the street walking pensively. We waved and he waved back. Having not yet seen the show, I did not know…
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A bed sits center stage at the Broadhurst Theater, in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment from the 1980’s. As Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune opens, Michael Shannon as Johnny and Audra McDonald, Frankie, make passionate love. From the grunts and groans, it’s pretty good sex we are witnessing, and when Johnny…
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As the Tony Awards draw near, it is worth noting, at Bay Street Theater, in one very funny scene of a new play, The Prompter, an actress makes her Best Actress acceptance speech without thanking the very person most responsible for her award, her prompter. In her return to theater after a 20 year hiatus,…
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Wow! No Glenda Jackson for being Lear, nor Mockingbird for Best Play! What are they thinking? Frankly, the list is good and thoughtful, and pleasing for a critic who studies the scene, and wonders from some reviews, did they see the same play as I did? First, Annette Bening in All My Sons, brilliant! And…
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Oy! The Cossacks are coming! In the essential viewing Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish at Stage 42, as we know, the Jews in the fictional town of Anatekva are threatened by pogroms. Eventually the lives of Tevye and Golde, their five daughters, and all town-folk are disrupted; they are forced to take refuge elsewhere.…
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Can you imagine a premise more ridiculous than a play featuring maids tidying up at a dump? Nathan Lane and Kristine Nielsen perform a comedic pas de deux, squeezing the gas out of dead Roman corpses in a giant heap in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus at the Booth Theater. Cadavers require care: servicing…
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At Playwright’s Horizons, Halley Feiffer, author and actor is making it with a serial adulterer, with Hamish Linklater in the role, in her comedy “The Pain of My Belligerence.” A master at creating young women who laugh at themselves, Feiffer explains in her program note, her plays skim the neurons of her life, and they…
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Nothing says worker like hair tied up in Rosie the Riveter do-rag. The Classic Stage Company’s revival of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 song cycle, Cradle Will Rock, hits a proletarian note. The talented ensemble, led by Tony Yazbeck as Larry Foreman, made up of steel workers, cops, newsmen, church officials, or factory owners, attempt or resist…
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If you tell Alex Brightman, the star of Beetlejuice on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater that he was born to play this exuberant, over-the-top part, he says, Oh sure! I was born to play this dead, Jewish, crazed, demon from the Netherworld! As if to say mockingly, that’s no compliment! When, in fact, it…
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Of course the story of the Temptations, the R&B group topping the charts with hits like “My Girl,” and yes, “Ain’t Too Proud,” would have to acknowledge the girl groups of the era. As the Temps rose to fame, so too did The Supremes, and in the glorious musical Ain’t Too Proud at Broadway's Imperial…
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When we ran into Melody Herzfeld at the Tony Awards, she seemed stunned at the place history had taken her. This week at a special screening of Song of Parkland, an HBO documentary directed by Amy Schatz, she had her Tony Award by her side, still stunned, and feeling guilty. She would have preferred a…
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Among the many fascinations of Eco Village, a new play by a gifted young playwright, Phoebe Nir, in production at the Theater at St. Clement’s Church, is a revision of communal life from the ‘60’s, reimagined for this generation of millennials. For many of us who remember our youthful era of sharing resources, it was…
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I have always thought of Sam Shepard’s True West as a two-hander. The brothers at the center of this heated drama, the screenwriter Austin and ne’re-do-well Lee, are entwined physically and spiritually; it’s their tension that enthralls. At the American Airlines Theater in a thrilling Roundabout production, they are Paul Dano and Ethan Hawke respectively.…
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On the expansive stage of Broadway’s Marquis Theater, a new production of The Illusionists does the near impossible, bringing the intimacy of close up magic to a big 1444-seat house. Eschewing the larger escapist tricks, or cutting a woman in two, or turning a mouse into an elephant, the show keeps the magic magical by…
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Prokoviev’s classic Peter and the Wolf is reimagined in a snazzy reboot at the Guggenheim Museum, an ingenious recreation from Isaac Mizrahi. The fashion designer cum cabaret performer has worked costuming for theater for decades, and for the Guggenheim’s program of Works and Process the Peter and the Wolf story is set, where else, but in…
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There’s a sweet hotel on Waverly, on the north side of Washington Square Park that could be the prototype of Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery at the Golden Theater. Even if that’s not the spot where Gladys, a remarkable Elaine May, runs an art gallery that does not seem to make much for the…
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New York City Center celebrated its 75th year with a performance of the iconic A Chorus Line followed by dinner at the Plaza Hotel. Back in 1975 when it first hit the stage at the Public Theater, A Chorus Line was a game changer of a musical. Scripted from taped interviews with theatrical types: singers…
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Family values loom large in the revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy on Broadway. The hyper loneliness of Arnold, a gay man who performs in drag is what the actor Michael Urie kvetches about in his pursuit of love. Dressing as the play opens under its neon Torch Song lights, Arnold could be anyone…
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In Northern Ireland in 1981 The Troubles pit Irish against Irish, resulting in a great deal of anguished, epic drama. Think Michael McDonagh, and the movies of Ken Loach. In Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, at the Bernard B. Jacobs theater on Broadway, a monumental 3 hours and 15 minutes zip by, beginning with the news:…
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Emily Mann’s Gloria: A Life, a theatrical event about journalist, feminist, activist Gloria Steinem is not so much a drama, but an exposition of the history of this wave of feminism, the feminist discourse of our time. As the titular Christine Lahti, sporting Gloria’s signature black bell bottom jeans and native American inspired belt with…
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