Theater
2688 results
Page 176
Brecht’s ‘Good Person of Szechwan’ at the Public Theater
A truly good life: My generation and yours
This irreverent, kitschy, politically incorrect version of Brecht’s cynical parable made me squirm. But my playwriting students loved it. Brecht probably would have loved it, too.
Articles
4 minute read
‘Hands Across Veronica’ at Walking Fish
Body image: The way we live now
Gin Hobbs’s Hands Across Veronica is a dark comedy that uses a tragic format to describe the way we live now: obsessed with image, and bereft of self.
Articles
5 minute read
‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Richard III’ in New York
Boys will be girls (again)
Everything about these two current productions— presented just as they were 400 years ago— is wonderful. You rarely hear Shakespeare’s poetry spoken so beautifully and clearly on the stage.
Articles
5 minute read
Bruce Norris’s ‘Domesticated’ in New York
Pity the poor philandering husband
Using Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Wiener as his prototypes, Bruce Norris’s blistering black comedy tells the story of a politician caught in a humiliating public sex scandal and beset by angry women. If only the protagonist’s anguished cry sounded more like his own and less like Philip Roth’s or Woody Allen’s.
Articles
5 minute read
‘Enemy of the People’: The Berliner version
When the theater becomes a courtroom
The Schaubühne Theatre from Berlin is back, with a daring, defiant version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People that sheds new light on a generation struggling to disengage itself from Germany’s catastrophic 20th-Century history.
Articles
5 minute read
‘I Am My Own Wife’ in Norristown
A legend in her own mind (or his)
I Am My Own Wife concerns a German transvestite who survived both the Nazis and the Communists. But were his/her heroics genuine?
Articles
2 minute read
Harold Pinter's 'Betrayal' on Broadway
Tragedy or travesty?
What’s the point in watching a play with glamorous superstars like Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, if you’re not going to derive any pleasure from it?
Articles
5 minute read
‘The Glass Menagerie’ in New York
A director who listens to his author
In John Tiffany’s tender production of The Glass Menagerie, the individual performances offer heartfelt interpretations of Tennessee Williams’s immortal characters. Cherry Jones may be the most formidable Amanda I’ve seen, while Zachary Quinto’s touching Tom is ironic to the point of tragicomedy.
Articles
6 minute read
‘Once’ at the Academy of Music (2nd review)
Not quite a concert, not quite a play
Once is a miniature folk concert accompanied by a slender story about a man and a woman who briefly come together, then go their separate ways.
Articles
4 minute read
‘Once’ at the Academy of Music (1st review)
Can music keep us together?
What’s more irresistible than two people falling in love to music? Especially when you can go on stage and order a beer and listen to Irish music at the same time? Whether such a love can last— that’s another story.
Articles
5 minute read