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The Bedbug
The rambunctious intelligence of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s THE BEDBUG is matched by that of the nine actors at the Medicine Show Theatre who play what were originally some 90 parts spread over a 50-year leap in time. Being able to see this early Soviet-era Futurist play is astounding enough, that it holds the stage with such…
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Yerma
Billie Piper deserves all the praise she gets as “Her” in Simon Stone’s YERMA, the Young Vic production now playing at the Park Avenue Armory. By the end she brings herself to a place of so much pain that empathy itself is taxed, and the curtain call feels, her face still trembling with emotion, like…
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Rosalía & Raül Refree
Rosalía sang flamenco Friday night at Joe’s Pub. She has height, and lankiness, and long expressive fingers, and a perpetually sensitive face, hot with emotion and soft with a kind of yearning. The air seems strung with filaments when she sings, quivering above, behind, and before her, and her tremulous lips part from time to…
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D.I.S.P.L.A.Y.E.D.
Heidi Latsky’s D.I.S.P.L.A.Y.E.D. is reached through several stories of descending stairway (or elevator), balcony, and lobby. On each level are encountered living sculptures, sometimes still as stone and other times in stylized motion. They evoke both classical sculpture and avant-garde fashion, draped in white but wearing 3-D geometric adornments, wires and corners contrasting the flow…
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Platonov
Penned at great length when the writer was just 18, Chekhov’s Platonov (never formally titled) was rejected by the actress for which it was written and not produced or published in the author’s lifetime. Yet it prefigures the themes and characters of the later plays, a poetic amalgam of fumbled suicides, frustrated loves, threatened estates,…
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Nella
Hearing the young Venezuelan singer Nella in real space for the first time felt like stumbling upon a new species. I wanted to collect specimens, come to understand it, preserve it. To the songs she sang from Spain and Venezuela she gave something familiar but utterly distinct, an Ibero-American sound completely her own, effuse with…
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Women in Music
There were two highlights for me in WOMEN IN MUSIC, billed as “a musical conversation between the United States and Spain” by way of Shakespeare and Cervantes inspired works composed and performed by women, one of solo piano, the other a suite of vocals. The first was Consuelo Díez’s Ser y tiempo (2011), a piano…
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iLe
The Puerto Rican singer iLe does for bolero and other of the ritmos of the Caribbean what a handful of Portuguese and Argentinian singers have done for fado and tango: capturing the lush glory of the past while bringing it with ease and relevance into the present. At 28 years, she understands that its happinesses…
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The Taming of the Shrew
People forget that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew starts with an induction in which a drunken vagabond is to be regaled with a theatrical performance of what is sometimes mistaken for the whole play. The Kate-Petruchio shenanigans is, in short, a play-within-a-play, an imagined world of sex-play and power relations, perhaps challenging to, but…
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Por amor al tango
A visit to Colombia to attend the Festival International de Tango de Medellín in June overlapped with a tour of the country by La Guardia Nueva, the guitar trio from Argentina that, earlier this year, won a first annual world competition for tango orchestras. They presented POR AMOR DEL TANGO, a CD featuring the singer…