-
Manon
I went to MANON to see Diana Vishneva, whom I have seen before, but too long ago and not often enough. This was her 10th season with the American Ballet Theatre, her second home along with the Mariinsky in Russia, and cause for great celebration at the weekend close. The ballet itself is of interest,…
-
Blues for Dixie
It should not have surprised me that Allison Moorer singing about the South brought tears to my eyes. Indiana, where I was born, and St. Louis, where I went to fourth grade, are more Southern than is obvious from the map. A strain of my ancestry runs through Virginia and Kentucky, and the nursery years…
-
A Doll’s House
The version of A DOLL’S HOUSE currently at BAM positions the iconic play within the Ibsen canon as a whole, an act that is no mere literary exercise, but which draws upon the entire body of work to invigorate the drama at hand. I think that there is no other playwright who so approaches Shakespeare…
-
Enemy of the People
In Thomas Ostermeier’s version of ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, we have met the people and they are us. In one of the cleverer manipulations of a Naturalist drama that I have seen, a genre of activist political theater is snuck right into the middle of Ibsen’s ironic critique of democracy and its discontents. The play,…
-
Una Noche
Lucy Mulloy’s UNA NOCHE is exquisitely edited. There are maybe two or three clichéd shots, which stand out precisely because the film as a whole is so fluent and sure handed in its visual rhythms. It is, broadly speaking, divided into two sections, both as a film and as a story: the second, which centers…
-
The Master Builder
There is much to appreciate in the version of THE MASTER BUILDER now playing at BAM. John Turturro’s sheer onstage presence as Ibsen’s feckless protagonist can scarcely be gainsaid, nor can the charm and playfulness of Wrenn Schmidt as Hilde, the young woman who changes everything by walking into – BACK into – the master…
-
Moses in Egypt
With the parting of the red curtain last week at City Center, The New York City Opera returned home from its long exile to Lincoln Center and other venues. The music to Rossini’s MOSES IN EGYPT is lovely, and among the performers Sian Davies as Elcia and Wayne Tiggs as Pharoah made a particularly strong…
-
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The plays and dramatis personae of Tennessee Williams are basically abstractions of emotions and other states of being. Stanley and Blanche are masculinity and femininity abstracted; in a very real sense they are detached qualities rather than people, even in the limited sense that fictional creations aspire to be. I think of the dreamy sentimentality…
-
Anna Karenina
I saw Joe Wright’s ANNA KARENINA a while ago and didn’t know what to think about it. This is not to say that I did not have feelings, thoughts, and sensations while watching it, that some of those were positive and some not, nor that I was not glad to have seen it (I was)…
-
Por el agua de Granada
Last week at Terraza 7 Train Cafe I saw POR EL AGUA DE GRANADA … CANCIONERO LORQUIANO, a collaboration of the Spanish singer Lara Bello and the guitarist Eric Kurimski to present renderings of Federico García Lorca’s poems and lyrics. As it happens, Bello is the very first person I would turn to for such…