The Academy Awards are almost upon us once again, and this Sunday night, the entire film industry will hold its breath while a bunch of old, white men tell us what they liked this year. Here, for the discerning theatergoer, is a stage-to-screen-to-Oscar guide to the most notable nominations (from our point of view, anyway). [Read more...]

Horror is a tricky genre for both stage and screen. It relies, perhaps more than any other genre, on emotion – evoking a gut-level, sometimes primal terror that makes the viewer forget, just for a moment, that they’re in a playhouse or movie theater. “The Woman in Black,” which opens today, aims to replicate the success of its literary and theatrical versions on the big screen – which would be no small feat, since the theatrical adaptation of The Woman in Black has been in continuous performance on London’s West End since 1989 (making it the second longest-running play in West End history, behind only Agatha Christie’s immortal The Mousetrap). [Read more...]

One of the few concrete tidbits we learn about German dance choreographer Pina Bausch over the course of the new 3-D documentary “Pina” is that she was a woman of few words. As should rightfully be expected from someone whose preferred mode of expression is bodily motion, she was of the opinion that dance expresses much more about the human condition than words ever can. [Read more...]

Glenn Close doesn’t play Albert Nobbs as a woman passing for a man – she plays the character as sexless. The straight-laced member of the waitstaff at Dublin’s Morrison Hotel keeps a tellingly low profile, lips sealed, spine arched, uttering few words, preferring the world to think of him –  because Nobbs identifies as male throughout most of the film, I will use the pronoun “he” in this review - as little more than that funny young man in the background. [Read more...]

The London stage version won 2 Olivier Awards; it picked up 6 Tony Awards in New York.
But will you like the movie?

“War Horse” finds director Steven Spielberg melding together the two genres he’s most well known for: children’s fairy tale and epic, tragic war story. Under any other circumstances, a film about the improbable, family-friendly journey of one sad-eyed boy’s sad-eyed horse during the Great War would be a perfectly respectable by-the-numbers entry in the expansive catalogue of the 65-year old master. [Read more...]

 Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage takes to the screen

There’s a scene late in “Carnage” in which Penelope – the type-A, upper-middle class mother played by Jodie Foster – asks “why is everything so exhausting?” This question applies just as much to “Carnage” itself. This tale of sound and fury, despite sharp direction and a universally-strong cast, ultimately signifies nothing. [Read more...]

It’s one of history’s greatest ironies: The pioneering psychologists, those men and women who first stepped foot onto the vast expanses of our subconscious minds, were themselves not exactly the tightest screws. Although according to “A Dangerous Method,” they might very well have given some pretty damn good screws. [Read more...]

“West Side Story” is the safe musical, the one grasped easily enough by young (but not too young) audiences that it’s become one of the de facto introductions to theater. Of course, it helps when your source material is Shakespeare, your music is Bernstein/Sondheim and your legacy is ten Oscars. Now that the mega-successful 1961 adaptation of the hit Broadway musical has turned 50 and seen fit to unleash a 3-disc Blu-Ray special edition, I wanted to revisit the film itself to see how much of its finger-snapping razzle dazzle still has the power to wow. [Read more...]

There’s one crucial component of film stars that separates them from theater actors: eternal preservation, the simple fact that a winking, luminous Marilyn Monroe in her white dress in 1954’s “The Seven Year Itch” would remain that way, sexy yet innocent, in 2011. [Read more...]

Making the most of a Muppet

When Kevin Clash plays Elmo, his face takes on an otherworldly demeanor as his arms manipulate the furry red monster. You can see his eyes drift off like they’re staring at somewhere far away, almost rolling into the back of his head. He looks like he’s possessed, like the high-pitched baby voice protruding from his mouth is being put there by the puppet on his hand instead of the other way around. Is it so crazy to think that being a Muppeteer involves a bit of cosmic reverse ventriloquism? [Read more...]