Philip William McKinley and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa should get themselves to East Fourth Street. They are the director and playwright charged with transforming the newly de-Taymored $65 million (and surely rising) Broadway extravaganza Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark into something entertaining, understandable and enjoyable. And it turns out that down at the tiny New York Read More
Odd films from the New Hollywood continue to dot the landscape. After playing a tattooed neo-Nazi and singing jazz in a Woody Allen musical, the versatile and charismatic two-time Oscar nominee Edward Norton travels the low-budget route in the disturbing but riveting Down in the Valley, a New Age cowboy movie that is more at Read More
Big
changes are rumbling through the Berkshires this summer, where the most revered
and rewarded summer theater in America is launching its 51st season with a
facelift that is hailed by some as a fancy new beginning and compared by others
to the launching of the Titanic. In
October 2003, Read More
Friday, March 28. Has there been a change in the emotional tone and texture of life during wartime in the city? I keep picking up on signals of a certain kind of gentleness and connectedness, perhaps a response to the ungentle, disconnected footage on TV.
There are indications that some people are seeking ways of Read More
Chekhov is such a lovely writer, isn’t he? I think, feeling foolish: Where would we be without him? Where would modern theater be? And humanity, of course, suffering, farcical humanity. “I think that in Anton Chekhov’s presence everyone involuntarily felt himself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one’s self,” wrote Maxim Gorky. For Read More
Now, you might not entirely agree with my view that George Bernard Shaw is an old windbag, but surely he was never young. The mythic image of the man is of a pixilated guru stroking his long gray beard in sunny, bemused mischief.
G.B.S. was born old, wise from the cradle, as it were. He Read More
Gwyneth Paltrow is spending her summer vacation learning how to act. Instead of $10 million a picture in Hollywood, she’s making $500 a week in Massachusetts playing Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Williamstown Theater Festival. She’s no snob, but there’s no doubt her movie stardom is the biggest lure of the Read More
