As an art critic in the theater reviewer’s seat, I found myself wondering why the art market continues to hold dramatic appeal, and why so few people get it right. Of course biographical plays have always appealed, whether done straight, like the play “Red,” about Rothko, or more dreamily, like the Seurat-refracting “Sunday in the Park With George.” Yet the big-money domains of the auction houses and the largest galleries remain stubbornly beyond most writers’ faculties.
Category: theatre
How One Song Changed The Arc Of ‘Natasha, Pierre, And The Great Comet Of 1812’
“More than just a nice showcase for Josh Groban, ‘Dust and Ashes’ makes the non-linearity of mental illness dramatically compelling.”
How Do You Turn John Cage Into Staged Theater? With A Chess Match, Of Course
In Chess Match No. 5 from Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, “the two people onstage are conspicuously playing chess; they also make toast, fiddle with a radio, drink tea and trade disconnected aphorisms and anecdotes [from Cage]. They are not visibly doing theater, if that means plot, traditional characters or singing cats.”
Belarus Free Theatre’s Shows Will Go On, Despite Arrest Of Actors In Crackdown
The NewsHour‘s Elizabeth Flock talks to BFT artistic director Natalia Kaliada about the large (and rare) demonstrations that broke out last weekend against the government of longtime dictator Alexander Lukashenko and the company’s activities connected with them.
Jesse Green Had *Not* Planned On Being A Critic, Let Alone A Theater Critic (And Now He’s Headed To The New York Times)
Rob Weinert-Kendt talks to Green about how he got into criticism (sideways and reluctantly), all the things he did before, and how even he had hoped the Times wouldn’t hire another white guy.
Ex-NYT Theatre Critic Charles Isherwood Joins Startup Broadway Website
“Isherwood will be writing for Broadway News, a new online venture from Broadway Briefing, an aggregator of theater news. Isherwood will be joined in reviewing by Elizabeth Bradley, an arts academic at New York University and former producer, manager and administrator with long ties to Canada’s Stratford Festival and the Sony Centre in Toronto, among others. The new site will launch next week.”
An Industrial Hellscape On A Giant, Round Conveyor Belt: ‘The Hairy Ape’ At The Armory
Erik Piepenburg visits Stewart Laing, designer of the enormous, glaringly colored sets that revolve around the audience in director Richard Jones’s revival of the Eugene O’Neill play.
Actress Playing ‘Malvolia’ Hits Back At Telegraph Column Arguing Actresses Should ‘Get Their Mitts Off Male Actors’ Parts!’
Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish used the current National Theatre production of Twelfth Night, which features Tamsin Greig as a female Malvolio, as a jumping-off point for a column suggesting that gender-reversed casting is becoming entrenched and that actresses – and theatres – should spend energy finding and developing female equivalents to the roles of, say, Hamlet or Willy Loman. Now Greig has responded, saying not only that Cavendish used “slightly unenlightened vocabulary,” but also that “he would not have dared to say anything if it had been a black man playing Malvolio.”
‘The First Theatrical Landmark Of The Trump Era’
Michael Schulman offers an essay on Lynn Nottage’s Sweat.
Ontario’s Stratford Festival Sold 500,000 Tickets This Year Setting The Stage For…
The surplus was $687,000 on revenue of $62.4 million, with attendance of 512,016, the festival reported at its annual general meeting on Saturday. According to a news release, passing the 500,000 mark is significant because it’s “where the festival begins to operate most effectively.”