A HOME RUN What do you think of when you think of home? Is it the place where you were born? Is it where you are living now? Is it where you followed your growth by measuring yourself agains…
SOURCE: stageandcinema.com at 04:59PMGLORY GLORY GLORIA I don’t know if Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has ever worked in a Manhattan publishing house but he sure knows his way about the workplace. In Gloria, he paints an extraordina…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:48PMREBIRTH Which walls are worse? Those that keep people out or those that keep people in? Playwright Rogelio Martinez seemed to have this question in mind when he wrote Born in East Berlin, wh…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:57PMGREAT F. SCOTT! If you love literature, have fond memories of being read to or of reading to others, and feel, as so many do, that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in the Pantheon…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:07AMJUMP FOR JITNEY It is an incontestable fact that every play August Wilson wrote justifies being looked at again and again. It has been fascinating to see how the moral, political and emotion…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:21AMA PASSIONATE PASSION Stephen Sondheim’s Passion is less a work of art than it is an art piece and the Custom Made Theatre Co., in its lovely and elegant chamber version, treats it as such.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:59PMGO TELL MAMA: CABARET‘S A HIT Cabaret was and remains one of the boldest and most innovative experiments in the history of musical theater, a ravishing work that has neither lost its power…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:18PMEVEN WHEN HAIRSPRAY CAN’T HOLD UP… THE EXPERIENCE CAN There are some shows that are beyond criticism or, rather, shows that render criticism totally unnecessary, and the Bay Area Musical…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:18PMI WANNA SEE THE PRODUCERS Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The Celebration production of The Producers is as far away from the Borscht Belt as a New York musical comedy — who…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:00PMGREEK TRAGEDY IN THE ‘HOOD Having read Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey, one can see that is a true original, that it possesses power, anger, frustration, political and social outrage, that …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:26AMA ROLLER COASTER RIDE TO THE HEART OF DARKNESS I will always love good theater but, even so, every so often there comes along a play that actually restores one’s faith in the possibilities…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:38AMACTOR DOUGLAS NOLAN: TOTALLY HUMAN AND TOTALLY ABSURD If you’ve ever seen a production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano that had you in stitches from practically the very first momen…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:18PMI ALWAYS LIKE TO BE KISSED WHEN I’M BEING… Inspired lunacy? Or strained silliness? Irreverent? Or just plain vulgar? A broad range of Latin musical genres? Or music that’s just plain d…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:36PMWHAT AN ABSURD WORLD The first scene in the A.C.T. revival of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist masterpiece Rhinoceros, directed by Frank Galati with razor-sharp clarity and breakneck swiftness a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:02PMTOOT-TOOT-TOOTSIE, HELLO! I’m here to sing the praises of all those musical comedy freaks who have been jonesing for a contemporary musical that will bring back, in some new form, the gold…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:49AMSO WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE? As Shakespeare said, “Good wine needs no bush.” Thus, there is no need to add to what New Yorkers have already discovered, that no matter how many productions of…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:49AMSEND IN THE CLOWNS A bloody war is ended. The bodies pile up. Who will clean up the mess? What to do? What to do? Oh, yes. Send in the clowns. On this note, Taylor Mac, the certified genius …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:42PMTEMPUS FUGIT There are great performance artists and, rarer still, there are great artists who perform. John Kelly is both. His Time No Line is a quietly breathtaking meditation on his life …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:19AMA SMALL STEP There is a stillness in B.D. Wong that is the embodiment of grace. In his exquisitely calibrated portrayal of Wen Chang, a Chinese party loyalist, Wong walks a delicate line bet…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:21PMMAYOR DREAMS COME TRUE SOME OTHER TIME The 42nd Street Moon production of Fiorello is just fine, if you allow for the looseness of staging, the clumsy choreography, and the overall sensation…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:07PMTHE BOYS IN THE BLAND “Every day a little death/In the parlor, in the bed.” Thus spake Stephen Sondheim in his waltz time operetta A Little Night Music. And it is not totally frivolous t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:08AMCARRYING BAGGAGE Although it is written with an almost childlike simplicity, Mfoniso Udofia’s Her Portmanteau tells a wrenching tale of the profound effect that separation creates when a w…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:46PMYOU MOSCOW, YOU MOSCOW The avant-garde seems more interested in re-invention these days than in invention, but from the point of view of someone who had thought that there was nothing new un…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:01PMB-SIDE MYSELF Breathes there a soul who hasn’t sung along with a favorite album? And, ah, if the songs we sing were rare and challenging and related to one’s life, we might have …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:13AMMAKE A CALL ON THIS INSPECTOR In Stephen Daldry’s architectually inspired revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, an astute mixture of comedy of manners/tragedy of class/…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:19PMA TRIUMPHANT TRAINWRECK If you’ve never applauded a trainwreck, be prepared to do so when you see Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow. I am not talking about the gossip-driven, hardly rev…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:06AMFORGET YOUR TROUBLES. COME ON, GET HAPPY. When the lights go up on Wild With Happy, we see Colman Domingo, in cool shades and wearing his best Paris-Is-Burning attitude, speak his opening …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:27PMMAXWELL COUNTRY: WHERE HEROES ROAM There is only one Richard Maxwell and, in his extraordinarily textured Neutral Hero, he has gone back to his roots. For those of us who have longed for t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:03PMWHERE IS DR. STRANGELOVE WHEN YOU NEED HIM? The best thing about Joe Kern’s Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want To Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them is its title. And if it bears a cl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:06PMSOLD: ONE HOUSE. AT A DISAPPOINTING RATE. Since Daniel Fish has been certified a new genius by New York’s avant-garde elite, I am loath to label him a hoax on the basis of having seen ju…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:38PMSMILE, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING Andrea Marcovicci, who reinvented the torch song for a new generation, has looked our depression/recession straight in the face and decided that what she…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:09AM