On a Tuesday night last summer-July 14, Bastille Day-I saw my first play as The Observer‘s new theater reviewer. It was Vanities, an awful Off Broadway musical at the Second Stage, and the evening was memorable only because it was also the night the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, the trade Read More
Let’s acknowledge from the outset that the script for Lend Me a Tenor, the backstage farce—really, the offstage-and-back-at-the-hotel-room farce—that opened at the Music Box Theatre Sunday night, contains nearly as many implausibilities as an hour in Jack Bauer’s life.
Among them: that Tito Merelli, the great Italian tenor at the center of the play, Read More
An Education
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Nick Hornby
Directed by Lone Scherfig
Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Emma Thompson
Riding in on waves of raves from film festivals around the world, the exquisitely made British coming-of-age film An Education features, as its centerpiece, a career-breakthrough Read More
The Lodger
Running time 96 minutes
Written and directed by David Ondaatje
Starring Simon Baker, Hope Davis, Donal Logue, Alfred Molina
The latest embellishment of the classic horror tale The Lodger can best be described as Jack the Ripper in Hollywood. The creepy 1913 novel by lurid literary queen Read More
Concerning the controversy over whether David Leveaux’s revival of Fiddler on the Roof at the Minskoff Theatre is Jewish enough, may I ask everyone to remain calm while we remind ourselves of the most important thing:
Tradition, tradition …. Tradition!
Tradition, tradition …. Tradition!
Who day and night
Must scramble for Read More
Art , Yasmina Reza’s very funny 90-minute play that just opened at the Royale Theater, is a delight in more ways than one. This intermissionless comedy of splendid ill manners famously revolves around a white-on-white abstract painting that almost ruins a 15-year friendship between three men. But the surprising artfulness of Art is that it Read More
