Expression: Chew the scenery.
Definition: To act melodramatically; overact; ham it up.
We’ve all seen actors chew the scenery from time to time. It goes with the territory. But how many of us can claim to have seen an actor actually gnaw on a set?
My thanks to the Read More
Has a play ever been revived with more alarming frequency than Hedda Gabler (1890)? As Ibsen’s ghost was heard protesting in Kristiania, Norway, only last weekend: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
Hedda Gabler is apparently the only play that Henrik Ibsen ever wrote. While the derided revival Read More
Is there any job more weird than an actor’s?
I’m not so sure that all the world’s a stage, actually. Actors are different from you and me. They pretend to be other people via a state of deliberate amnesia.
It’s commonplace to say that actors must speak the lines as if Read More
Three or four things I know about Harold Pinter who died in London on Christmas Eve, age 78:
To visit him in his Holland Park home was to enter unwittingly into a Pinter play. After greeting me at the door of his office—which was in a separate cottage in the grounds of the house Read More
Broadway must be the only industry in America that hasn’t noticed the country is in an economic crisis. Its powerful producers and theater owners aren’t just refusing to acknowledge reality. They’ve even got the chutzpah—or the manic greed—to increase ticket prices.
Take the price of an orchestra seat for the new Read More
I went to see four Christmas and Chanukah shows recently, and I trust I won’t be revealing any bias—kayn aynhoreh—in anything I say about them.
Take Slava’s Snowshow, now at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. The masterly Russian clown’s production brought out the Grinch in me in this crucial respect: Read More
Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, which has made a very welcome transfer to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, couldn’t be timelier.
Mr. Foote’s gentle, comic parable about self-interest and desperation over the fate of a family estate in the playwright’s imagined small town of Harrison, Texas, first premiered at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in Read More
I urge you to see the new production of Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the Minetta Lane Theatre, not least because the signature piece that Ms. Clarke created almost 25 years ago is so transparently lovely and sexy.
While her troupe of dancers is beautiful and utterly natural in Read More
Billy Elliot is the best thing to happen to Broadway for a long while. The hit West End show about a working-class boy in a doomed North of England coal mining town who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer pulls off a remarkable trick: It’s the first musical I’ve seen to successfully combine a huge Read More
In last week’s column I argued in favor of the awesome simplicity of Peter Brook’s production of The Grand Inquisitor—that its complete lack of video effects amounted to a revolutionary statement nowadays. Mr. Brook has steadfastly avoided using the fashionable technological stuff (the computer-generated illusions, film projections, video images, infrared cameras, scrims and so on) Read More
