Independent reviews of television, movies, books, music, theatre, dance, culture, and the arts.
Live Last read · last published · next check
Jeff Irving, Damien Atkins, and Travis Seetoo in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense . (Photo: Michael Cooper.) P. G. Wodehouse gets the 39 Steps treatment at Shaw in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense (at the Court House, once more open to audiences until the renovation of the Royal George is completed). The narrative justification for turning this particular convoluted farce into a…
Uproar in Heaven (1979), Collection of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy. The figures in Guan Liang’s paintings seem almost to have wandered out of a child’s notebook. Warriors lean at improbable angles. Mythological heroes appear slightly awkward, their bodies stretched, compressed, or tilted beyond the limits of realism. The colours arrive in sudden bursts, the lines appear hesitant, and the…
Julia Course and Martin Happer in Heartbreak House . (Photo: David Cooper.) The allegorical high comedy Heartbreak House is one of George Bernard Shaw’s strangest plays; it is also, in my estimation, his greatest. (For me the other contenders are Man and Superman and Major Barbara , though I don’t pretend to have seen or read them all: he wrote more than sixty.) Set in a country house in Sussex…
Sara Farb as Fanny Brice (understudied by Jade Repetta at the performance our critic attended) in Funny Girl. (Photo: David Cooper.) Since Funny Girl made Barbra Streisand a Broadway star and the 1968 William Wyler movie version enshrined what may be the greatest musical-comedy performance ever recorded, it took more than half a century for the show to generate a major revival. The one-two punch…
André Sills and Krystin Pellerin in Othello . (Photo: David Hou.) The question up for grabs in any production of Shakespeare’s Othello is why Iago sets out to destroy Othello and those he loves. In the 1995 movie with Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh’s motivation for Iago’s actions was straight off the surface of the text: he was angry at his general for selecting Cassio rather than himself as…
Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade . (Photo: Universal/Criterion Collection.) In a career devoted to giving audiences pleasure, Stanley Donen was never closer to the mark than in his 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain (Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s hilarious burlesque of Hollywood’s conversion from the silent era to the talkies) and the 1963 Charade . These are two of the most blissful…
Tony Yazbeck and Ben Jacoby in City of Angels . (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.) The 1989 City of Angels is one of the wittiest and most original musicals ever written. Its brilliant book by Larry Gelbart, one of America’s premier comic voices throughout a storied career, is simultaneously a musical parody of a film noir and a delectably cynical treatment of Hollywood, set in the golden era of noirs,…
Portrait of Louisa May Alcott by Lance Austin Olsen. “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship. Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.” Louisa May Alcott Alcott was not quite the quaint homespun lady who wove utopian fables of blissful childhood dreams that her writings, or at least one segment of her complex literary persona, would have you believe. She was…
Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses . (Photo: Sarah Lee.) It’s not likely that many people read Choderlos de Laclos’ spectacular 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses these days, but Christopher Hampton’s dramatic version, first produced in 1985, has become, deservedly, a repertory staple. In the original West End production and again on Broadway, the matched…
The company of The Balusters . (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.) David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters , which enjoyed a twelve-week limited run as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club season, focuses on the tensions between neighbors of different races, cultural backgrounds and predilections whose veneer of politesse cracks under the pressure of their pursuit of different agendas. It’s a distinctly…
“Art never saved the world. It cannot do so.” --Marcel Duchamp “Everyone is an artist.” --Joseph Beuys The 20th century. Oh how I do miss that century these days. It was a virtual dynasty of dissonance and discontinuity, a breathtakingly radical realm of overturned assumptions and collapsing complacent expectations. Almost all the accepted truths, from science and religion to literature, music and…
Jeremy-Daniel.jpg)
