Articles
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Orchestra plays Mozart and Bruckner (1st review)
After perfection, what's next?
The Dutch-born conductor Jaap van Zweden performed Mozart's 19th Piano Concerto and Bruckner's Ninth Symphony in his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra, with soloist Horacio Gutierrez giving a fine account of the Mozart. Van Zweden knows what he wants and mostly got it from the Orchestra, though the last, dying notes of the Bruckner were almost predictably fluffed in the horns.
Articles
5 minute read
Guston miniatures, in New York
The odd couple: Guston and Nixon
The McKee gallery's latest show of the late work of Philip Guston displays a different but striking aspect of this American master's genius: small oils that distill the remarkable imagery of his final decade in work of great power and originality. They are as well a portrait of the Nixon period, speaking truth to power in an era of lies.
Articles
5 minute read
"Ragtime' revived in New York (1st review)
A second chance for Ragtime
The new budget-minded revival of Ragtime is apt and, in some scenes, provides more clarity than the 1998 original. But one particular economy disturbs me.
Articles
4 minute read
"boom' by Flashpoint Theatre
The end of the world (and a better idea)
Biology nerd meets nihilist, comet meets planet, and there's a middle-aged woman pulling the levers. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom is often very funny, but the credit belongs to the actors, not his pretentious script.
Articles
4 minute read
Pianist Anna Polonsky at Fleisher
Polonsky aroused
The pianist Polonsky brings a determined personality to the keyboard, and her attack is so concentrated, and so vivid, that at one point the rocking of her body brought a flashback of the New Wave band Devo to mind.
Articles
2 minute read
Irving Penn's 'Small Trades' at the Getty Museum
Seen any knife grinders lately? Irving Penn's vanishing world
Irving Penn's "Small Trades," an elegiac look at the independent contractors of yore by the famous Vogue fashion photographer, is no mere exercise in social slumming, but a catalogue of professions rendered obsolete by an economy that, increasingly now, no longer creates but rather devours work.
Articles
4 minute read
Philadanco's 40th anniversary
A night of happy heinies
Philadanco's 40th anniversary show made for a night of happy heinies”“ one of creation's cutest assets. Three of the four works on the program featured swaying, vibrating and bumpin' butts. Even the company's 77-year-old matriarch, Joan Myers Brown, gave her shapely rear a shake.
Articles
4 minute read
Who should play Helen Keller?
Blind actors and blind alleys: Who should portray Helen Keller?
Inclusivity advocates are up in arms because a sighted, hearing celebrity actress has been hired to portray the blind and deaf Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. They say they're concerned about creating better art, but their logic suggests otherwise.
Articles
5 minute read
Jude Law as "Hamlet' on Broadway
Our latest Hamlet: What a piece of work is Jude Law
Jude Law, the latest in a seemingly endless line of Hamlets, is a deeply emotional Hamlet who wears his heart on his sleeve, holding nothing back. In the process he brings out all the colors and complexities of what it means to be a man today, or any day.
Articles
5 minute read
"Precious': Ghetto fantasy film
Up from the ghetto (to Hollywood heaven)
Combining Horatio Alger and The Blackboard Jungle with a dash of Oprah, Precious examines the life of a desperately damaged black teenager in the Harlem of the 1980s. The message of moral uplift is as predictable as it is unconvincing.
Articles
6 minute read