Monday, May 21, 2012
I’m trying to remember when I first saw the performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, but that’s like trying to remember someone’s first time making you laugh: there are no s…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, May 14, 2012
Is Nathan Lane his generation’s Ethel Merman? While watching him take on the role of Theodore (Hickey) Hickman in Robert Falls’s complicated, intellectually bracing staging of Eu…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, April 30, 2012
Nostalgia can be such a comfort, reversing time and washing away the years of regret, loneliness, weight gain, and bad investments. “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” a new musical, …
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When Frank Langella donned a trench coat after having sex with an emotionally available married lady in the 1970 film “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” he was telling us as much about …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMThe lighting that Jeff Glass designed for Ike Holter’s “Hit the Wall” (at the Steppenwolf Garage, in Chicago) is so authoritative that it feels like a set in itself. With c…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, March 26, 2012
I love Jesus. Yes, I do. Or, more accurately, I love Jesus for the way his story informs the work and the imagination of various artists I admire. I did not grow up in a particularly religio…
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The director Richard Maxwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Early Plays” (at St. Ann’s Warehouse) has the supreme realism of a dream. It is happening, …
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The two men look as though they’d crawled out from under a rock into a landscape of broken glass and shit. Their little shack, in the South African town of Port Elizabeth, is less a ho…
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Rachel Dratch, one of the finest comedic talents going, has the eyes of a woman who can’t believe what just happened really happened, and it might happen again, so she prepares for it …
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In 1985, a performer named Lady Bunny founded Wigstock, in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, and the dream was this: drag artists like Bunny and RuPaul (then relatively unknown) would s…
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The theatrical pioneer Joe Cino wasn’t interested in the mundane. The operatic highs and lows of his life weren’t separate from his great creation: a café that’s large…
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After Mrs. Alice Hauptmann (Zoe Caldwell) held my right hand in her small, scarlet-nailed fingers and looked at me spiritlessly while smiling a perfunctory little smile for what felt like a …
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Part of what makes Diane Keaton’s memoir, “Then Again,” truly amazing is that she does away with the star’s “me” and replaces it with a daughter’s &…
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Nellie McKay has the sort of considerable talent—basically she’s an actress who sings, which is to say a monologuist with her own distinct sound—that makes us all feel we h…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 14, 2011
At first I didn’t get it. But soon after I started seeing Thomas Bradshaw’s plays, in 2008, Rochelle Owens’s voice began to insinuate its way into my thoughts as well. It …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 7, 2011
Long ago, before Manhattan’s meatpacking district was a cavernous, stress-inducing playground, a number of clubs there were home to a different kind of noise. At Jackie 60, run by the …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 31, 2011
First-generation American writers often have two stories to tell. There’s the story of their inspiration and the quest for a discipline to give form to their imaginings. Then thereR…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMCharlotte Rampling is a living paradox: an actress whose allure depends less on the passion she ignites than on her efforts to stamp out—or to avoid—admiration. It seems as if sh…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 24, 2011
Historically speaking, the stage is a notoriously difficult space for novelists to fill. Henry James is a famous example of a brilliant writer whose dreams of footlight glory were not meant …
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When I went to Ellen Stewart’s memorial last winter—she died at the age of ninety-one—I met several people who had not only worked with her on the stage but helped her crea…
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The stuff that’s always interested me about “The Threepenny Opera” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the marquee names most closely associated with the pie…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFew artists and writers of color haven’t at least heard of the Hatch-Billops Collection. Situated on lower Broadway, in Manhattan, the collection, which was founded by the theatre hist…
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When Alfred Preisser and Christopher McElroen founded the Classical Theatre of Harlem, in 1999, they started off auspiciously, staging works ranging from “Medea” to Jean Genet…
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As audience members took their seats before a recent performance of the director Diane Paulus's politically radical and dramaturgically original musical adaptation of DuBose and Dorothy Heyw…
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The theatre can kill a man. As in the art and film worlds, which the stage sometimes brushes up against but never entirely submits to—Thalia and Melpomene are pretty haughty girls̵…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, July 18, 2011
I'm not really much of an opera queen. When, among my gay male friends of the eighties, the talk turned to opera seria versus the "reform" operas of the mid-eighteenth century, say, or opera…
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