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Lou Doillon
In Lou Doillon’s face is writ the whole mad glorious complex of transgression and art, attraction and repulsion, intelligence and sex that entails the allure of her clan. Even the features of her half-sister Charlotte Gainsbourg’s father are uncannily there, but, then again, so is the face of her own, the filmmaker Jacques Doillon. Jane…
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Rita Redshoes
Rita Redshoes does, to begin with, wear red shoes. They were rarely glimpsed Monday at Joe’s Pub, amid the onstage monitors, but accented her black outfit assertively. Redshoes’ given name – she is Portuguese – is Pereira. Whether there is a story to the stage name, I don’t know, but it fits her art pop…
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Our Last Tango
The Wim Wenders produced OUR LAST TANGO, by German Kral, reconciles art with life and narrative cinema with documentary. The lives are those of María Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes, probably the longest enduring couple in Argentine tango as a performing art. I am careful how I put that, because there are social dance…
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Alberto Ginastera
Alberto Ginastera was born on April 11, 1916, and it was a hundred years later, on April 11, 2016, that the Spectrum Symphony presented a centennial commemoration of the Argentine composer at the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. The wide-ranging and innovative concert wasn’t limited to works and performances by Ginastera or other artists with…
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The Crucible
The director Ivo van Hove has turned his eye on THE CRUCIBLE, Arthur Miller’s treatment, in 1953, of the Salem witch trials as analogous to McCarthyism. Van Hove’s version begins, as did his A View from the Bridge, also by Miller, with a black scrim interposed between the audience and the playing area. No –…
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Sense & Sensibility
To put Jane Austen on stage is to make sensible the implicit theatricality of her novels. To be Kate Hamill, adapting Sense and Sensibilty as SENSE & SENSIBILITY, and acting its principal role, is to layer it further. To be Bedlam doing it at The Gym at Judson, with a flair for double-casting and Shakespearean…
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Pericles
No play in Shakespeare is more impelled by the power of story than PERICLES. It could be a tale improvised on the spot, out of bits of myth and wrinkles of fate, a complication here, a resolution there. Its domain is the Mediterranean, which means, in the age of Shakespeare, a tale of all the…
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The Cherry Orchard
Things are ironically prominent in the THE CHERRY ORCHARD brought by the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Most of the action happens on a pile of household possessions, much of it covered in white sheets, at audience level, in front of a stage blocked, most of the time,…
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Annemarie Heinrich
They might, in an English novel, have been called “womanly,” the left perched elegantly on the grip of the cane, the right draped, like a napkin, across the opposite wrist. From there, the eye follows the arm to the crook of the elbow and up to the face. It is, the portrait, perfectly proportioned to…
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The Tango Fado Project
Manhattan Camerata will deliver again, this time with flowers, THE TANGO FADO PROJECT to (le) poisson rouge for, albeit a day late (on Presidents Day), a “Valentine’s Concert.” This is not a gimmick: the heart of the camerata is, in its own words, “a couple in love who were invited to participate by another couple…