How are we to recover from what divides us? How do we maintain hope in the face of catastrophe from climate crisis? Such questions are not new; in fact the clamor of them pounding for our attention has so dominated our conversation and full-throttled crashed into our current existential angst it’s almost deafening. However, Annalisa […]
Archives for November 2019
The Inheritance Broadway Review: Gay Life Then and Now
The Inheritance, a long, ambitious play about three generations of gay men in New York, pays homage to two masterpieces, without being one itself. Yet the play by Matthew Lopez, making his Broadway debut, is both sweeping and intimate, sophisticated and raw, a weepy that is often funny. Several performances are transporting, including two actors […]
Review: Matilda The Musical at NextStop Theatre
Despite being one of the last books Roald Dahl ever wrote, Matilda has remained one of the British author’s highest-selling works. Even so, The Guardian notes a significant jump in Matilda’s global sales since 2016, the year of Brexit and the last U.S. presidential election. At its core, Matilda is a lesson in learning about […]
Review: The Velveteen Rabbit at Adventure Theatre MTC
The best and worst part of toddlers are their Big Feelings. Just the morning of me writing this piece, my toddler (who we call The Shark) has displayed righteous indignation at not being allowed to untie my shoes, throwing-herself-on-the-floor rage at being asked to go to the potty, and screaming delight at booping my nose. […]
Review: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra gets a lusty, lively staging at ASC
Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s saga of love and war, in which — spoiler alert — war wins. Our situation is this: Julius Caesar has been assassinated and, after some skirmishing, the silver-tongued Marc Antony, along with Caesar’s deputy Lepidus and Caesar’s great-nephew Octavius, now rule Rome as a triumvirate. Antony is on a mission […]
Evita Review at New York City Center: A Feminist Spin with Two Evas
It’s surely pointless, four decades and two billion dollars after its debut, to rant about Evita, and silly to blame Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatrical canonization of the amoral historical figure Eva Perón as paving the way for the elevation of another media personality remade into a dictator-loving populist. Still, this core problem I have with the […]
Review: Airness. An air guitar comedy whose wildly talented cast strikes a comedy chord
“The whole impetus of air guitar is world peace,” earnestly intones a grown man who goes by the name Golden Thunder right before he goes out on stage in a dingy bar to play a pretend instrument. This one moment, perhaps more than any other, perfectly encapsulates Chelsea Marcantel’s hit air guitar play, Airness, currently […]
Review: The Willard Suitcases. Pack your bag to catch this ingeniously staged new musical at ASC
The end of your life starts slowly, and after some incomprehensible incident. Everything seems dreamlike. They are talking to you – the policeman, the lawyer, the judge, the doctor – and you can understand some of what they’re saying, but you blank out on the rest. You are going to have to leave — and […]
Review: Olney’s Singin’ in the Rain sings and taps up a storm
A Hollywood classic gets the royal treatment resulting in a heaping helping of theatrical magic courtesy of Olney Theatre Center’s staging of Singin’ in the Rain. As Hollywood ballyhoo might have trumpeted back in the day: Olney’s Singin’ in the Rain sings up a storm and rumbles the stage with a torrent of tap-dancing. Boasting […]
Review: Disney’s Newsies, the youth-revolt inspired musical
Newsies is a frolicking, joyous musical with a healthy dose of “kid power:” the perfect recipe for families this holiday season. Based on the original Disney film and drawing from the real-life “Newsboy Strike” of 1899 in New York City’s 5 boroughs, the musical follows the fictional ringleader of the newsboy rebellion, Jack Kelly (Daniel […]
Dance review: Mark Morris’s Beatles tribute ‘Pepperland’ lacks an emotional core
The deconstruction of a cultural touchstone by an acclaimed choreographer is an appealing notion, all the more so to live music. But although it was superbly performed Wednesday night, Mark Morris’s 2017 Pepperland, riffing off the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, feels conceptually slapdash. As brilliant and original as Morris is, that’s not […]
Richard Clifford: on directing Shaffer’s ‘revenge comedy’ Amadeus and Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare films
“I think that anybody coming in will go, ‘Oh wow: look at those people; look at that time in life; look at that relevancy to now. That man is being so horrible to that other person; why?’ In that way, yes: it reaches everybody.” I had asked Richard Clifford, whose production of Amadeus opened at […]
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