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
It’s been 40 years since Peter Brook wrote in the opening to The Empty Space, his famous manifesto, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre Read More
The 20th anniversary production on Broadway of David Mamet’s famous dissection of Hollywood, Speed-the-Plow, raises a burning question: In publicizing the play, has Mr. Mamet finally gone off his rocker?
His quite recent public conversion from a self-described “brain dead liberal” into some kind of neo-conservative pedagogue isn’t at issue here—except Read More
