Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Annemarie Heinrich

    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…

  • Let the Right One In

    Let the Right One In

    Eli, the adolescent vampire of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN at St. Ann’s Warehouse, is scary strong, and Rebecca Benson, the adult who plays her, is scary good. There is a scene in the second act that is, within the universe of the play, an agon between life and death, living human and undead adversary.…

  • A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

    A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

    There were times during A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT when it felt as though I were watching a movie for the first time in my life. It has been a long time since I have gone to anything so viscerally pure and original. It is a classic oddity: a North American release set…

  • Only Lovers Left Alive

    Only Lovers Left Alive

    I have never been so admiring of Jim Jarmusch as have his acolytes, but he seemed the perfect choice to direct a vampire movie and had the good taste to include a scene of Yasmine Hamdan singing in a café, so I was drawn without resistance to ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. There is a lot…

  • Nosferatu

    Nosferatu

    I was the one in the audience who liked the TR Warszara and Teatr Narodowy production of NOSFERATU that closed Saturday night at BAM. The show was in Polish, with English supertitles, and presented by an ensemble cast whose names (some of which have showed up in press reports) were not in the program. The…

  • Sleeping Beauty

    Sleeping Beauty

    Michael Bourne subtitles his dance to Tchaikovsky’s SLEEPING BEAUTY – “A Gothic Romance.” He turns the tale, first told by Perrault, then by brothers Grimm, later by Petipa as choreographer, and yet again by Disney, into a vampire love story set around the fin de siècle. This is not completely inappropriate. An overlap may be…