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The Interitance on Broadway
Matthew Lopez, Stephen Daldry and Bob Crowley Truple Team for Brilliance
By: - Nov 28th, 2019The moving two-part drama, The Inheritance, began its stage life at the Young Vic in London. The play transferred to the West End and is now on Broadway. For seven hours, divided into two sessions of theater, the history of gays in American unfolds. At its heart, the playwright Matthew Lopez weaves language of great beauty mixed with humor. Spanish words are sprinkled throughout, ay meo (oh God), la fiesta (the party) and maracon (faggot) among them. These are not phrases but rather exclamations. The word 'faggot' is never used in the play.
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Mother of the Maid by Jane Anderson
Marin Theatre Company
By: - Nov 30th, 2019The playwright’s contribution to the Joan of Arc literature is that her mother, Isabelle Arc, becomes the voice and the central character. Thus, while Joan’s actions are of historic significance and drive the narrative, Isabelle dominates the stage time. The play centers on family relationships, especially between mother and daughter.
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Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill
At Custom Made Theatre
By: - Nov 30th, 2019What makes many of Churchill’s works distinctive and what helps in understanding them is her frequent non-traditional approaches to time representation and to casting.
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A Christmas Carol
At the Lyceum Theatre
By: - Nov 30th, 2019Even if you say bah humbug to holiday shows you might want to check out this one on Broadway.
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Groundhog Day
Me and My Shadow in San Francisco
By: - Nov 30th, 2019The premise of Groundhog Day is that Pittsburgh TV meteorologist Phil Connors is assigned to cover the annual event against his wishes.
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Solitude
To Be Alone Is Not Lonely
By: - Dec 06th, 2019Particularly during holiday season, we as social beings, crave the company of friends and familty. Between now and New Year there are many gatherings. It is a time of celebration and excess. This season of ritual tends to play out or wind down into winter hibertaion. My neighbor and friend the North Adams monk, Michael McGrath, discusses the alternative approach of embracing solitude.
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Newsies the Musical
At Hillbarn Theatre
By: - Dec 09th, 2019What makes Newsies really jump is the dancing with the accompanying choruses like “Carrying the banner” about the independent but challenging life of selling papers on the streets, and “Seize the day” about striking to get their due.
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Amahl and the Night Visitors
Gian Carlo Menotti's Christmas Spirit for Today
By: - Dec 10th, 2019On Site Opera revived what one hopes will become an annual production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. In choosing settings for familiar and unfamiliar operas, On Site adds an intriguing dimension to the form. With Amahl, the location in the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen returns the opera to its original meaning.
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May Stevens at 95
Artist Was Born in Quincy Massachusetts
By: - Dec 11th, 2019The Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City announces the passing of May Stevens. The artist was born in Quincy, Massachusetts and educated at Mass College of Art. Her work was shown and collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Noura by Heather Raffo
Produced by Marin Theatre Company
By: - Jan 17th, 2020Noura constitutes playwright Heather Raffo’s admirable contribution to the confrontation between assimilation and tradition faced by foreign born in American life. The title character and her husband immigrated to the U.S. eight years before the time of the play.
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An Almost Ordinary Summer
Launches Palm Springs International Film Festival
By: - Jan 17th, 2020The Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF), the third-largest film festival in America, began in 1989 as the dream of then Hollywood celebrity turned politician and former Mayor Sonny Bono, who had a dream of making his city a focal point for the motion picture industry by launching an annual film festival.
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