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Measure for Measure
MEASURE FOR MEASURE is one of the more fascinating plays in the Shakespeare repertory, comedic in its structural attributes yet, it is thought, dark in tone, involving as it does an act of sexual blackmail to stop the execution of a young man for getting his girlfriend pregnant. But after seeing the Fiasco Theater’s rendition…
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A Doll’s House
The version of A DOLL’S HOUSE currently at BAM positions the iconic play within the Ibsen canon as a whole, an act that is no mere literary exercise, but which draws upon the entire body of work to invigorate the drama at hand. I think that there is no other playwright who so approaches Shakespeare…
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Jewels
Last week at the New York City Ballet I saw George Balanchine’s JEWELS, a full-length ballet in three parts, “Emeralds,” “Rubies” and “Diamonds”, created in 1967. There is a sense in which, when we see a Balanchine at the NYCB, which he co-founded, we are seeing a work “from the repertory”, and another in which…
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King Lear
The end of the Chichester Festival Theatre’s KING LEAR tore my heart out and cast its remnants on a desolate plain. But I’ll get to that later. Up to then, Angus Jackson’s production, currently on loan to BAM, is refreshingly straightforward but somewhat nondescript; it tells the story, without dragging, but rises only occasionally to…
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Green Porno
Isabella Rossellini’s GREEN PORNO is a series of short films that explore, usually with her in costume, the sexual and reproductive life of animals. They are both instructive and delightful (as Horace might have said) and moving (as Cicero would have added). There is an underlying didactic intent, combined with overt theatricality, that tempts one…
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Yasmine Hamdan
It can be a special gift to listen to a song in a language that you neither speak nor understand. A language has its own rhythms and tonalities, just as musical forms and genres do, and when there is singing, the musicality of language merges directly with that of the instruments. The deepest engagement with…
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The Descent of Orpheus
St. Paul’s Chapel is a lovely place, the sort of structure that tempts the non-believer to belief and, no doubt, reconfirms adherents in theirs. That aesthetics can have such an effect is one of mysteries of being human, and it applies, of course, to music as well as architecture. It is, then, appropriate that the…
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The Mystery of the Ordinary
The René Magritte exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art has stayed with me since I saw it last month, on the day after Thanksgiving. I suppose that, among the Surrealists, I have always thought first of Dalí due to the iconic status of his melting clocks and cinematic collaborations with Buñuel; and then of…
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California Winter
I was glad to see my friend and former student Elizabeth Dominguez in CALIFORNIA WINTER, which was screened Wednesday as part of the New Directors series at Anthology Film Archives. The film is a noticeably well-informed work about the foreclosure crisis at the heart of the 2008 crash. The writer and director Odin Ozdil explicates…
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Machinal
Any credible list of the greatest U.S. plays would include Sophie Treadwell’s MACHINAL. It is our tautest and most rigorously constructed in the Expressionist mode, by any standard a masterpiece of feminist art, and one of the most universally applicable (and least commercially motivated) of all BOATS (Based-On-A-True-Story) dramas. It has not been revived on…