Tuesday, April 16, 2013
A human moment at last (photo by Joan Marcus)
It’s hard to wear a smile and a sneer at the same time, but Matilda the Musical sure does try. This new British import is both day-glo bright…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 08:50AMFriday, April 12, 2013
NOTE: Next week I'll see Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park for the third time, after taking it in on Broadway and at Woolly Mammoth, when I visit Baltimore's CENTERSTAGE, where they're doing the …
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 04:08PMAt the heart of religion are mystery and terror; peace, joy, gratitude, and forgiveness, it seems to me, are byproducts of, responses to, our encounters with the divine, which is maybe just …
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 08:48AMWednesday, April 10, 2013
This is why I love the theater, or keep coming back to it, in any case: It holds my attention like nothing else. It may be my age, and it most certainly has to do with the multi-screen age w…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 08:45AMTuesday, April 9, 2013
I got a lot of response to Sunday's post on the future of arts journalism—encouraging words, actionable ideas, quibbles. I should acknowledge the response of Bitter Lemons, the site that g…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:02PMSunday, April 7, 2013
When I opine and argue about the state of criticism and arts journalism, as I have often in this space and which I had occasion to do last week on HowlRound, I realize I speak from a po…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 08:03PMFriday, April 5, 2013
in Light My Fire at Teatr.doc
This time last year, thanks to the generosity of the Center for International Theatre Development, I was in Moscow to cover the Golden Mask festival, a sort …
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:21AMMonday, April 1, 2013
The Lisps
I've been in bands, and I've written musicals, but apart from my actor/singer/musician adaptation of The Devil and Tom Walker a few years back, I've never really put the two …
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:30AMSunday, March 31, 2013
Among the many things critics can be counted on to have strong opinions about is their own reason for being. Indeed, the why-criticism-matters essay seems as evergreen a genre as the don't-l…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 06:02PMWednesday, March 27, 2013
Pippin at the ART (photo by Michael J. Lutch)
I'd never met Diane Paulus until my recent interview regarding her new revival of Pippin for Time Out NY. We chatted on a rehearsal break at t…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:20AMSunday, March 17, 2013
I was raised by Germans and Eastern Europeans but discovered a few years back, when I tracked down my birth mother, that in fact my blood runs Dutch and Norwegian, with a smattering of Irish…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 12:49AMMonday, March 11, 2013
As there always is, there was more to my interview with Nobel winner Elfriede Jelinek than I was able to fit into my Times piece. She asked, through her translator Gitta Honegger, if she cou…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:48PMTuesday, March 5, 2013
Apologies, I've been too buried under deadlines to even point you in the direction of one of the stories that put me under the gun: a piece in the paper of record on the U.S. premiere of Elf…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 12:04AMThursday, February 28, 2013
There are signs everywhere that the Woman’s Project production of Elfriede Jelinek’s “Jackie,” about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is not a traditional bio-play.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 08:00AMWednesday, February 20, 2013
Since the revision of his 'The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,' the monologuist says it's played some part in bettering conditions in China.Is the ecstasy and agony of Mike Daisey final…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:30PMPhoto by Ursa Waz
One little-remembered wrinkle in the chronology of last year's Mike Daisey scandal is that, between the time he appeared in January on This American Life to talk about bru…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 07:32AMThursday, February 14, 2013
Dizzia and Keller in Cradle and All (photo by Joan Marcus)
Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller aren't a couple in real life, but the current New York Theatre Workshop production …
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 12:24PMMaria Dizzia and Greg Keller, the leads of Amy Herzog’s drama “Belleville,” are used to playing a couple together, though they aren’t one offstage.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 12:16PMFriday, February 8, 2013
Burstein at the 2012 Tonys, performing "Buddy's Blues" from Follies
I first spoke to the extraordinary, multifaceted actor Danny Burstein for a TDF story back in 2008, wh…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 06:43PMDanny Burstein, a self-described “working stiff,” takes on the lead role in “Talley’s Folly,” showing he is a go-to actor for dramas as well as musicals.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:32PMTuesday, February 5, 2013
Theater-related blogging has been light here, I'll confess. That's because whatever bloggy energies I have have been redirected to my music blog, where I've been revisiting formative albums …
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:00AMMonday, February 4, 2013
Loved this anecdote from Julie Crosby, artistic director of the Women's Project: At a recent performance of Bethany (which, by the way, I can't recommend highly enough, as much for the taut,…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 08:43AMWednesday, January 23, 2013
Finally caught the Broadway folk phenom Once last night, and I liked it, but what impressed me most was the endearing fragility and directness of its sound; there are some well-chosen reverb…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:01AMŽeljko Lučić in Rigoletto
Years ago, when I first arrived in New York, I was up for an editorial position at the fine Met-produced magazine Opera News. I was in the running but it wasn't…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 09:30AMWednesday, January 16, 2013
Photo by Carol Rosegg
I've been mostly knocked on my ass by the New York flu since my Ed Wood musical reading last week, but I managed to file this piece for Time Out before t…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 10:46AMFriday, January 4, 2013
Coming out the gate into 2013 a little buried under deadlines, not least for next week's staged reading of The Passion of Ed Wood, my long-gestating musical with Justin Warner (deets here).
…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:45AMSaturday, December 15, 2012
(photo by Scott Landis)
Incredibly busy at the moment, but I'll take a moment to point you to my latest review, of a particularly high-profile Broadway property:There’s a classic bit of ad…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 10:00AMMonday, December 10, 2012
If Lincoln improves upon reflection, it is partly because it inspires reflection at all. That may sound like a low bar—there are plenty of subpar entertainments that may get stuck in our h…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 02:13PMMonday, November 19, 2012
Katori Hall recently gave the keynote at TCG's recent Fall Forum, which I didn't get a chance to attend, so I'm glad to see that the speech is now up on the TCG blog.
It's worth listening t…
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 12:14PMFriday, November 16, 2012
Hartmere and Intrabartolo (photo by Linda Lenzi)
In 2000, a scrappy little rock musical—sorry, "pop opera"—called Bare became a sensation in the confines of Hollywood's Hudson Theater, …
SOURCE: The Wicked Stage at 11:34AMA revised version of the 2000 musical “Bare,” about teenagers wrestling with religion and sexuality, is getting a new Off Broadway revival at New World Stages.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:00AM 
