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King Charles III
Watched without sound, the Broadway production of Mike Bartlett’s KING CHARLES III would suggest a Shakespeare in modern dress, a tragedy or a history, drawing some sort of parallel with the current royal family. Maybe it’s Henry IV: there’s a fellow who looks like Harry cavorting with commoners. And the guy who resembles Charles (a…
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A View From the Bridge
I took an onstage seat for the Young Vic production at the Lyceum in New York. First row, right, center. I stared at a black scrim, an aisle’s width away. Two hours later, there was a drop of red liquid on my shoe. It dissipated harmlessly. I sat breathless. I wasn’t able to go with…
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Carol
Acting is the art of the inscrutability of the self. If, as Sartre would have it, the other person is unknowable, and, as Grotowski said, “no one can know the mind of the other person,” then it is the actor’s conundrum to know the mind of the person she plays and make him knowable to…
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Carminho • Sara Tavares
The fadista Carminho sang almost by surprise last week at City Winery. The concert was announced perhaps a week before, but she stood before a full house, following an energetic set by the Portuguese creole artist Sara Tavares. It wasn’t the only way she surprised me. I expected, from what I had seen of her…
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Lulu
In William Kentridge’s production of Alban Berg’s LULU at the Metropolitan Opera, consciousness comes, hesitantly, into being, fragments, reconfigures itself, then shatters again, and is still, hours later, in uncertain consonance with the exterior world. It’s a completely realized work of Expressionist theater, the fin de siècle form that portrayed an individual perspective at odds…
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Lera Lynn
Start with her name and her voice. They both speak of country and its close cousins folk and Americana. The name implies a pedigree that, so far as I know, is coincidental (assuming it is not a stage name: other than that she is from Georgia and went to certain schools, her available bios are,…
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Thérèse Raquin
The whites, greys and blacks of the Roundabout’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN are so muted that, when a brown-hued backdrop appears, it is like a flash of color, and so, later on, is a sparse scattering of autumn leaves, dropped and faded. The interiors, when they appear, are dim and woody, the windows opening, at best, on…
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Melissa Aldana
South Americans get the saxophone in a way that gets to me. It started with Gato Barbieri and Last Tango in Paris, his tenor paradoxically sharp and lush, a bite and a kiss. It stayed with me, like an inoculation against its own forgetting, since first I heard it. Then, a few years ago, when…
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Cloud 9
The pleasures of CLOUD 9 are theatrically intense and exhilarating to think about. The Atlantic Theater Company realizes the Caryl Churchill drama with a Shakespearean flair, in the round, its cast as skilled as they come, immersed in the mimetic arts, each playing at least two parts, identities dropped and put on again, like masks…
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Emel Mathlouthi
With Emel Mathlouthi, I confronted the difficulty of listening to political song in a language I do not understand. In some ways this should not have been hard. She tells us what the titles mean or the lyrics refer to: freedom and justice, breaking silence with speech and putting pen to paper, not to avert…