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Mies Julie
Yael Faber’s MIES JULIE, which adapts the Strindberg play to what is bitterly described as “the new South Africa”, is a raw, explicit, and sanguinary baring of a national soul. The white Julie, whose class has ostensibly been defeated, still has her sexual encounter with John (the “Jean” of the original), whose class – and…
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Untrained
UNTRAINED is a piece by the Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin that pairs two trained professional dancers with two untrained non-dancers. The latter are auditioned and swapped out with new non-dancers every so often, so as not to let their fish-out-of-water qualities dissipate with experience. The dancers, for reasons unclear to me, are all male; perhaps…
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Stephane Wrembel
Many thanks to my friends at Fada for introducing me to the Brooklyn-based French guitarist Stephane Wrembel. Wrembel’s online bio is worth a look – his most influential musical tutelage was in the gypsy guitar, and his credits include the theme for Woody Allen’s magic realist comedy Midnight in Paris, which he performed live at…
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Price Check
If I had to have a newly appointed Boss from Hell in a regional office of market research for a chain grocery corporation who starts off her tenure with a symbolic firing, makes the company Halloween party costume mandatory, comes to said masquerade dressed as Pocahontas (or someone), sexually harasses the male staff, and plays…
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Skyfall
Now that Moore, Roger Moore has declared that Craig, Daniel Craig has overtaken Connery, Sean Connery as the best Bond ever, it may be time to reflect upon the whole Bond enterprise and why it has endured for half-a-century. The evolution of Bond as a cultural icon calls attention to how its progress has paralleled…
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The Roman Tragedies
I would say that last night I sat through six hours of Shakespeare’s three historically-based Roman tragedies – in Dutch, but in fact I did what I was invited to do and milled about. I lounged center-stage on a couch for the first scenes of Coriolanus, at one point dodging a flurry of papers tossed…
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Donka
DONKA: A LETTER TO CHEKHOV is penned and posted in the language of circus. Jugglers, clowns, aerialists, and acrobats are its author. In their writing of it, the director Daniele Finzi Pasca tells us in the program, they “give shape to the silences” in Chekhov’s notes, diaries, and letters. This is not, in other words,…
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Holy Motors
In HOLY MOTORS Denis Lavant plays Oscar, a gnarly and dissipated man who is driven around Paris in a limousine to keep “appointments” for which he dons costume and makeup and performs violent or otherwise transgressive acts. It is a sort of invisible theater for clueless onlookers the purpose of which is, at least initially,…
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Café de Flore
Antoine is happy, the narrator of CAFÉ DE FLORE informs us, in the presence of the blond mistress for whom he has left his wife as a result of a shared glance at a Quebec nightclub It was an instantaneous connection, not unlike that which he and his wife experienced in childhood, or, oddly enough,…
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower
There is much to be admired in Stephen Chbosky’s film of his novel THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, but what struck me the most was how terribly likable it was. Its very flavor – if it had one in the manner of the “rasas” of the ancient Sanskrit drama – would be enjoyability. Of…