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Hot Magadalene at HERE
Danielle Birrittella Sings Richly of Love and Lust
By: - Jan 15th, 2020Danielle Birrittella, the co-creator of Magadalene, has a rich, inventive lyrical delivery of the poet Marie Howe's words. She dares to explore the divide between feminine and erotic in Magdalene, a work having its world premiere at HERE in New York.
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Jeremy Schonfeld's Iron & Coal
Rock Opera at Prototype
By: - Jan 14th, 2020Iron & Coal is a live rock show presented as part of the Prototype Festival at the Gerald Lynch Theater in New York. The title refers to an iron will to survive, but also to the charred emotions that remain after a concentration camp incarceration. The songwriter Jeremy Schonfeld tells the story of his father’s arrival in America at 11. He searched for his place in our sun, and especially to answer the question: for what purpose did I survive when so many others did not.
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American Son
Riveting Drama by Christopher Demos-Brown in Miami
By: - Jan 13th, 2020American Son is a gripping tragedy about race in America today. Chistopher Demos-Brown's piece is a multi-faceted play in which marital, paternal and racial conflicts collide. A quartet of actors present impressively natural performances. American Son runs through Jan. 26 in Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center.
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Garrett Fisher's Blood Moon in World Premiere
Prototype Presents a Moving Contemporary Noh drama
By: - Jan 13th, 2020Blood Moon is a chamber opera created with consummate sensitivity and skill by a team of artists, including the composer, a passionate appreciator of Noh theater, and the prize-winning playwright, Ellen McLaughlin. One of McLaughlin’s specialties is the adaptation of classic dramas for our time. The composer also likes to jump off from the past, and react to a work created many moons ago in the present now.
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Frontline Filmmaker David Sutherland
18 Million Viewers for The Farmer’s Wife
By: - Jan 09th, 2020The documentary filmmaker, David Sutherland, describes his approach as making portraits. The issues derive from the persona of his subjects which range from farmers, to teenagers coming of age in Appalachia, a battered Native American mother, to the artists Jack Levine and Paul Camus. In the past 20 years he has created 21 hours of film for long form documentaries featured on Frontline for PBS. His three-part series “The Farmer’s Wife” was a PBS hit with 18 million viewers.
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Matthew Lopez’s Epic The Inheritance
Sniff of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End
By: - Jan 06th, 2020In this two part play, that runs more than six hours, Matthew Lopez focuses on the modern generation of gay men whose current acceptance is built on the backs of earlier generations.
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Copenhagen By Michael Frayn
Do the Math
By: - Dec 30th, 2019“But why did he come to Copenhagen? What was he trying to tell you?” This opening line by the deceased Margrethe Bohr is the entry point of Michael Frayn’s multilayered delight of a Tony-winning Best Play – equal parts science lesson, mystery, biographical drama, and morality play.
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Dance Nation at Steppenwolf Theatre
Adults Playing Teens
By: - Dec 30th, 2019Clare Barron’s play is about a crew of 13-year-old girls (and a token boy) from Liverpool, Ohio, who are competing in regional dance contests that could culminate in a trip to YAY! Tampa Bay, Florida!!!! YAAAAAYYYY!
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Obama’s Picks for Best Films
Everyone’s a Critic
By: - Dec 30th, 2019The conventional wisdom is that everyone is a critic. Which is an insult to those of us who pursue the difficult and complex craft. Why on earth would I give a fig about the year end movie list of former president Obama? I don't dabble in politics or take up brain surgery as a hobby. Having an opinion, and posting on social media, does not make you a critic.
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TON presents Honegger with Felix Valloton
Sight and Sound at Metropolitan Museum
By: - Dec 25th, 2019Leon Botstein, the polymath conductor, has taken on a delightful series, Sight & Sound, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With The Now Orchestra (TON) he offers a musical program which is related to a current exhibit at the Museum.
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30 Americans at the Barnes Foundation
Not Incidentally Black Artists
By: - Dec 24th, 2019Representative works from the Rubell Family collection are on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. This is the 10th anniversary presentation of 30 Americans which has travelled the country, but have been seen only once before in the eastern United States. The Barnes presentation is striking. The art even more so.
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Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom
At Ashby Stage in Berkley
By: - Dec 24th, 2019Despite some elements that don’t hold as well as one would like, this play offers worthy ideas, and the production exceeds expectations.
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Villainous Company
Suspenseful Play at South Florida's Primal Forces
By: - Dec 23rd, 2019Boca Raton-based Primal Forces presents a riveting production of Villainous Company. Three actresses thrive in their roles. The characters aren't quite whom they claim to be in Victor L. Cahn's suspensful play.
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The Jack Quartet in Residence at New School
Exploring the Different Sounds of the Bow
By: - Dec 21st, 2019Jack Quartet is in residence at the Mannes School of Music, the New School. They opened their program with Clara Iannotta’s “Dead Wasps in the Jam-Jar." The title is rich with suggestion. Wasps are not bees, but the buzzing was reminiscent of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral interlude from "The Tale of Tsar Sultan."
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The Thin Place by Lucas Hnath
Playwrights Horizons Holds a Seance, Sort Of
By: - Dec 21st, 2019Lucas Hnath is a master storyteller, weaving threads from seemingly odd places into a seamless whole, which always intrigues. Playwrights Horizons has mounted his The Thin Place, in which shifting forms ask deep questions. Some suggested answers are novel.
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A Christmas Story: The Musical
Stage Adaptation Of Beloved Film in South Florida
By: - Dec 20th, 2019The professional, non-profit, regional Slow Burn Theatre Company is staging a rousing production of A Christmas Story: The Musical. The Ft. Lauderdale company's production runs through Dec, 29. A top-notch cast delivers as triple threats.
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The Plot at Yale Rep
Will Eno's World Premiere
By: - Dec 19th, 2019I’m looking forward to seeing the next iteration of The Plot as Eno continues to develop and refine this work.
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Pride and Prejudice Reinvented
Long Wharf Produces Kate Hamill Adaption
By: - Dec 19th, 2019Kate Hamill, playwright of Long Wharf’s current production Pride and Prejudice has created somewhat of a cottage industry adapting famous 19th century novels by Austen and Thackeray though now she has moved onto 19th century American novels. Her approach will either delight or infuriate you.
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Second Mainstage Musical for Barrington Stage Company
Ain’t Misbehavin’ Joins South Pacific
By: - Dec 17th, 2019Can there be too much of a good thing? Barrington Stage Company is known for staging classical musicals. But now Ain't Misbehavin has been added to South Pacific. This seems more about the bottomline than balanced programming. The Assembled Parties by Richard Greenberg is the third high season production on the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage. Anna in the Tropics, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Nilo Cruz, will highlight the St. Germain Stage.
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Everything Is Super Great
World Premiere Of Comic-Drama In South Florida
By: - Dec 16th, 2019Everything is Super Great is a touching and relatable comic-drama. Stephen Brown's new play is receiving a co-world premiere production at Florida Atlantic University's professional company, Theatre Lab. The production runs through Sunday and features strong acting. The play might remind some of Terrence McNally, with its focus on themes such as the power of art and the importance of human connection.
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Lucy Shelton at National Sawdust
Legendary Singer of Contemporary Song Lofts Stravinsky and Rochberg
By: - Dec 16th, 2019Lucy Shelton, the legendary soprano, did not let us forget. If we don't live in the action and passions of our musical times, we risk not having lived at all. Igor Stravinsky vocalise, with no words and only sung notes, introduced the evening.
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Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake
At the Ahmanson Theatre
By: - Dec 14th, 2019Internationally acclaimed Director/Choreographer Matthew Bourne returned to Los Angeles on December 5th with a reinvigorated and a brilliantly reimagined production of his most celebrated work that originally burst onto London’s Saddler Well’s stage in 1995; taking the world of ballet by storm.
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Seance with Benjamin Britten
The Crypt Conjures Brittain
By: - Dec 14th, 2019The Crypt Session as imagined and realized by Death of Classical point the way to music’s lifefulness going forward. New, young audiences wait for months to get a ticket to one of these events. Tickets sell out moments after events like this Salon Séance are announced. Andrew Ousley, whose creation Crypt Sessions and The Catacombs assures us that more events in new locations are coming. A cave is promised in the future.
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Judgment Day at Park Avenue Armory
Richard Jones and Christopher Shinn Disturb and Thrill
By: - Dec 13th, 2019Entering the drill hall at the Armory, we are greeted first by sounds of birds flitting through the tall, pine trees in a forest stage left and right. Branches are laden with snow. The platform of a train station fills the front of the station. The scent of the plywood from which the big blocks of the moving stage are built, also wafts through the hall. The station master’s home is above the tracks. His wife often sits in the window, observing the action below. Express trains roar by, their lights glancing off the ceilings and the other block structures on a shiny floor, whose surface reflects. We are taken in.
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Boston Expressionist Jack Levine
Neglected Colleague of Hyman Bloom
By: - Dec 12th, 2019Separately at Jewish Settlement houses Jack Levine and Hyman Bloom studied drawing with Harold Zimmerman. In 1929, when Levine was 14, they were instructed at the Fogg Art Museum by Harvard professor, Denman Ross. By the late 1930s, with Karl Zerbe, they gained national attention as Boston Expressionists. After a lapse of decades, through February, Bloom is featured in "Hyman Bloom Matters of Life and Death." The MFA has never given Levine the time of day. In 1986, while making a film with David and Nancy Sutherland, I interviewed Levine.
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