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King Charles III
Watched without sound, the Broadway production of Mike Bartlett’s KING CHARLES III would suggest a Shakespeare in modern dress, a tragedy or a history, drawing some sort of parallel with the current royal family. Maybe it’s Henry IV: there’s a fellow who looks like Harry cavorting with commoners. And the guy who resembles Charles (a…
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Carminho • Sara Tavares
The fadista Carminho sang almost by surprise last week at City Winery. The concert was announced perhaps a week before, but she stood before a full house, following an energetic set by the Portuguese creole artist Sara Tavares. It wasn’t the only way she surprised me. I expected, from what I had seen of her…
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Lulu
In William Kentridge’s production of Alban Berg’s LULU at the Metropolitan Opera, consciousness comes, hesitantly, into being, fragments, reconfigures itself, then shatters again, and is still, hours later, in uncertain consonance with the exterior world. It’s a completely realized work of Expressionist theater, the fin de siècle form that portrayed an individual perspective at odds…
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Thérèse Raquin
The whites, greys and blacks of the Roundabout’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN are so muted that, when a brown-hued backdrop appears, it is like a flash of color, and so, later on, is a sparse scattering of autumn leaves, dropped and faded. The interiors, when they appear, are dim and woody, the windows opening, at best, on…
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Cloud 9
The pleasures of CLOUD 9 are theatrically intense and exhilarating to think about. The Atlantic Theater Company realizes the Caryl Churchill drama with a Shakespearean flair, in the round, its cast as skilled as they come, immersed in the mimetic arts, each playing at least two parts, identities dropped and put on again, like masks…
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Emel Mathlouthi
With Emel Mathlouthi, I confronted the difficulty of listening to political song in a language I do not understand. In some ways this should not have been hard. She tells us what the titles mean or the lyrics refer to: freedom and justice, breaking silence with speech and putting pen to paper, not to avert…
