Today is Wednesday, June 19, 2013
It's been a few years in the making, and it's still not ready to roll out just yet, but with a few other songwriters I've been putting together O Baby Mine, an album of Shakespeare-insp…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 05:00PMInsert obligatory apology for light posting here. The slowdown has been mainly due to my being out of town to report a big story on the Goodman Theatre's new Jungle Book. You may have h…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 03:26PMAt the end of an illuminating interview about her new adaptation of The Jungle Book for the Goodman Theater, Mary Zimmerman gives a snappish but, I think, profound answer to a commonplace in…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 02:09PMCross-posted at StageGrade. We're sensing a trend with our StageGrade Tony Poll: Critical dissatisfaction with shows themselves, coupled with huge love for the performers and directors of…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 04:34PMI was just kvetching to someone yesterday about how Kenneth Lonergan's 1996 watershed This Is Our Youth is almost never revived (a subject I covered at more length for Isaac last year), and …
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 12:25PMApologies for light posting lately, but I hope I can compensate with a few tidbits. I recently had the pleasure of looking back over the theater season with Kerry Weber, culture editor at Am…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:05AMWe're sensing a trend with our StageGrade Tony Poll: Critical dissatisfaction with shows themselves, coupled with huge love for the performers and directors of the self-same shows. In the ne…
Linked From stagegrade.com at 08:19PMFrom this space, four years ago today, I hailed Rocco Landesman's ascent to the helm of the NEA with an anecdote from playwright Oliver Mayer, who used to work in Rocco's office and describe…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:32AMI'm not sure the piece I wrote a few months ago about Belleville leads Greg Keller and Maria Dizzia, and their uniquely spiky chemistry playing couples onstage, captured just how much fun it…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 10:03AMTomorrow, May 29, marks the 100th anniversary of the debut of Le sacre du printemps, the ballet by Igor Stravinsky that revolutionized modern music, or so legend has it (this piece by Matthe…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:32AMI first heard about musical Renaissance man Dave Malloy when I graded the reviews for Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage for Critic-O-Meter back in 2009; the repeated comparisons of his ro…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 12:03PMOne of the subtexts of the recent news that Backstage would discontinue theater reviews altogether is that it was never inevitable that an actors' trade paper would review theater. Clea…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 11:58AMThe composer David Malloy is a one-man band, almost — with at least four duties, including a starring role — in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.”
Linked From The New York Times Subscription at 11:37AMRemember when the most blazing controversy about David Mamet was his heterodox approach to acting training? The publication in 1999 of his terse, contrarian True and False, which posited, in…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:35AMJenn Harris and Paul Kandel in Silence! (photo by Dixie Sheridan) Last week I got a news release that Silence! The Musical just clocked its 500th performance, and I couldn't be happier…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:49AMFor America magazine I've done a combined review of two entertaining and popular shows about iconic women leaders at either end of New York's nonprofit stage spectrum: The Public Theater's H…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 10:00AMOn Wednesday night I attended Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, the immersive Russian-indie-rock musical fashioned from a section of War and Peace; I'm reporting on the pie…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 07:12AMThe Public's new dance-club sensation Here Lies Love is pretty much as great as it's been cracked up to be (no. 2 on StageGrade, no less!), even if its retelling of the rise and fall of…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 07:12AMOn this day in 2007, I posted the following review excerpt: “Radio Golf” is a formulaic work that illustrates why [August] Wilson was not, in the end, a great artist: his approach to e…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:44AMSeeing it all before him (@Bettman/CORBIS) Among the theatrical heavyweights I've had the pleasure to interview is America's greatest living playwright, Edward Albee. It was in 2008, and th…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:18AMThe playwright's 'Dying City,' now at Rogue Machine Theatre (and the new 'Teddy Ferrara' in Chicago), examines the damaged and what damage follows. NEW YORK — David Mamet has his hustl…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:05PMHe's only one had one other L.A. production previously (Four at Celebration Theatre), and one high-profile premiere at nearby South Coast Rep (On the Mountain), both in 2005. But now Christo…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 02:43PMMy old friend and boss at the Downtown News, Jack Skelley, used to insist that classical music should be played loud, and I took him to mean not only that he had a taste, as I did, for noisy…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:50AMThe Lisps et al in an earlier incarnation of Futurity In this final installment of my three-part interview with César Alvarez (here are part 1 and part 2), we talk about the future of mus…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:48AMPart 1 of my interview with The Lisps’ César Alvarez went into some detail about his bands’ show Futurity, which originated in 2009, played at ART and at the Walker Center last year, an…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:22AMLike Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s Passing Strange, The Lisps’ Futurity features the band that wrote the show onstage performing the show, and as such it provided Exhibit A—literally, as i…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 10:26AMRooting around my back pages, I happened to come across a 2004 post about a number of religion-themed shows I'd seen at the time in L.A. (Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God, the Very Merry Un…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:35AMKwame Kwei-Armah has written a play inspired by “A Raisin in the Sun” that is being staged in repertory with “Clybourne Park” at CenterStage in Baltimore under the umbrella title “…
Linked From The New York Times Subscription at 01:06PMHow big of a deal is it that Baltimore's biggest theater has at its helm a Brit, and not just any Brit but Kwame Kwei-Armah, the London-bred son of Afro-Caribbean immigrants from Grenada? If…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 12:22PMTom Hanks and Maura Tierney in Lucky Guy (photo by Joan Marcus) The Tom Hanks/Nora Ephron romance, which brought them so much success with romcoms onscreen, has continued even after Ephron…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 11:47AMI just learned that Christopher Shinn's extraordinary three-character two-hander Dying City will get its L.A. premiere in the capable hands of Rogue Machine Theatre—a troupe whos…
Linked From The Wicked Stage at 09:32AM
