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Blue is the Warmest Color
The very first thing I noticed about BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR was that blue was the commonest color in shot, after shot, after shot. Articles of clothing, pieces of furniture, spots of paint on the wall, things on the street, park benches, blue in the background, blue in the foreground, blue somewhere in the…
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A Christmas Carol
Dickens’ Scrooge has always reminded me, at least a little, of Shakespeare’s Lear. There is a similar majesty to his tale, although the outcome is comic rather than tragic, and he is, of course, petty bourgeois instead of royal. In place of vain munificence, it is self-loathing stinginess that afflicts him, and he is brought…
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Much Ado About Nothing
The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit performs in prisons, centers for youth at risk, and the like, as well as dropping in at home base to offer particularly low cost Shakespeare to the Public’s regular patrons. It was interesting to see the Unit’s version of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING in a season during which there…
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Shakespeare on Broadway
If possible, see the Shakespeare’s Globe productions of TWELFE NIGHT and THE TRAGEDIE OF KING RICHARD THE THIRD back to back, on the same day. Go for drinks or dinner in between, make a day of it. It would also be good, budget and availability permitting, to opt for onstage seating for one and house…
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The Sextet at Dizzy’s
The Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet’s “Caras” hit the crowd at the start of Monday night’s second set at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola like an acoustic sandstorm. So blinding was the effect that if there was an eyebrow raised anywhere in the room by the jazz savvy Lincoln Center audience, it was impossible to see. And so…
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Tango-Fado
One of the happier minor features of the Cornelia Street Café is that from some seats in the house you can change your vantage by watching the musicians in a wall mirror rather than face on. This isn’t a bad metaphor for the reflections of and on musical forms that I saw and heard when…
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In a World
The pleasures afforded by IN A WORLD are basic, but they are not insignificant. They are those of a good idea skillfully realized, and of an unfamiliar world revealed through exceptionally smart storytelling. That world is the Hollywood voiceover industry, and the idea was to make a movie about it from the perspective of its…
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Glamour Tango
Polly Ferman presented her show GLAMOUR TANGO, subtitled “Tango in Feminine Form,” on Monday night at Tango House, using New York based, but international, talent, all of them, appropriately, women. It follows the basic form of a lot of tango shows. There is a live orchestra at the back of the stage, which includes Ayelen…
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Midsummer Night’s Dream
Julie Taymor’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is Shakespeare in bedclothes, and sheets in particular: billowing sheets, mussed sheets, straightened and cornered sheets, sheets that wormhole through trap doors and turn into bowers and hammocks, sheets hastily wrapped around discovered lovers, sheets turned into projection screens that demarcate the horizons of the dream world. The whole…
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Enemy of the People
In Thomas Ostermeier’s version of ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, we have met the people and they are us. In one of the cleverer manipulations of a Naturalist drama that I have seen, a genre of activist political theater is snuck right into the middle of Ibsen’s ironic critique of democracy and its discontents. The play,…