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Then, 1000 Years of Peace
You can never read all of the books, or see all of the films, or visit all of the places, or speak all of the languages, or see all of the theatre and the dance and the opera, or listen to all of the songs, or sing them, or embrace every lover, or wonder at…
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Nosferatu
I was the one in the audience who liked the TR Warszara and Teatr Narodowy production of NOSFERATU that closed Saturday night at BAM. The show was in Polish, with English supertitles, and presented by an ensemble cast whose names (some of which have showed up in press reports) were not in the program. The…
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Sleeping Beauty
Michael Bourne subtitles his dance to Tchaikovsky’s SLEEPING BEAUTY – “A Gothic Romance.” He turns the tale, first told by Perrault, then by brothers Grimm, later by Petipa as choreographer, and yet again by Disney, into a vampire love story set around the fin de siècle. This is not completely inappropriate. An overlap may be…
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Romeo and Juliet
Tea Alagić’s production of ROMEO AND JULIET at Classic Stage Company is in the tradition of Peter Brook’s “empty space.” I can almost imagine that seminal figure of the modern theater as having directed it. The script is pared to its essence, to just the point at which trimming a little more would do injury…
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Baden-Baden
The first of four pieces in BADEN-BADEN 1927, Gotham Chamber Opera‘s update and reassessment of the German spa-town festival held in that year, is Milhaud’s “Abduction (or Rape) of Europa.” It happens in front of a picture by the contemporary artist Georg Baselitz, who is known for exploring identical images in multiple works and from…
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Este nuestro espacio
The lovely little play that I saw on Saturday night began with the Spanish singer Lara Bello, dimly visible, evoking a lost bohemia from behind a diaphonous scrim, accompanied by the pianist Shai Bachar. It is almost a cameo to look at now, like something contained in a locket of long ago, from someplace in…
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Bohemian
Secret restaurants are a thing. You hear about them in Europe, in Buenos Aires, in New York. Some are pop ups, some are tucked away in dark alleys or at the back of other establishments. It is the aesthetic of the speakeasy, the private club, the clandestine party, the convocation of spies and secret agents.…
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Julius Caesar
For the London-based Donmar company’s JULIUS CAESAR at St. Ann’s Warehouse, we are herded into, and, two-and-a-half hours later, released from a place of mock confinement. Initially, we are retained in a holding room, between a door that has rolled down behind us and one ahead of us that has yet to open. One looks…
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Recuerdo tango
RECUERDO TANGO is the second of Mariela Franganillo’s tango shows that I have seen, and like the previous one, Tango Connection: Love Stories, it is distinguished by a feel for dramatic structure that goes beyond that of a revue whose main purpose is to showcase the history and virtuosity of the dance. Franganillo – in…
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Balanchine Short Stories
Of the multifarious branches of the theater that I have followed, and now and then even practiced, it is probably the classical ballet of which I have been the most neglectful. This is not as it ought to have been, particularly here in New York, where the ballet achieves an amplitude matched in few if…