The number of shows that I’ve been to that sweep you up into a world so complex, so narratively tight and visually arresting and thematically overwhelming…is exactly three. ...
How do women maintain their authority aboard a ship of men unaccustomed to taking orders from the would-be fairer sex – other than, in the evening’s strongest segment, on Mary ...
Its pastiche is as ambitiously diffuse as a night at the Ziegfield Follies itself – and if the production as a whole veers towards the disjointed, its sins are – ...
Knowledge may be power. But in Belladonna, a “Rappaccini’s Daughter”-inspired dance piece from Adam Barruch and Chelsea Bonosky, too much power can be toxic. Inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, ...
Perhaps fittingly, Bottom’s Dream’s The Ghost – like the two Shakespearean tragedies of power on which it is based – feels like an at-times disjointed union of two plays: one ...
A wildly exciting musical biopic on America’s master of macabre. Continue Reading The Horror of Edgar Allan Poe: Nevermore
A Chinese femme fatale and an American tea trader feature in this noir-inspired drama. But is it anything we haven’t seen before? Continue Reading Film Chinois: Down the ...
An extraordinary, exciting re-imagining of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov at the IRT. Continue Reading Dostoevsky, Distilled: Dmitri and the 3000 Kopeks
Writer-director Ava Lee Scott’s dynamic and personal production tests the limits of actor-audience interaction, though a few kinks remain. Continue Reading Ceremony and Complicity at Serenade
Splendid set-pieces and screwball antics feature in this Kaufman & Hart revival. Take your in-laws. Continue Reading James Earl Jones on Broadway: You Can’t Take It With You
In many ways, the Storm Theatre/Blackfriars’ Theatre revival of Gigi (adapted by Anita Loos from Colette’s novella) is as simple as its teenage heroine herself. Located in a fifty-odd seat ...
What price freedom? Euripides’ The Bacchae is a savage tale of mothers murdering children mistook for beasts, orgiastic pleasure and religious ecstasy that comes at the cost of the ramparts ...
A starchild searches for a home. A love-lorn woman seeks revenge on the lover (and sister) that wrong her. A father and son duke it out over the dinner table. ...
How polite do you have to be to the person interrogating you? In the first half of Victor Cahn’s slickly-paced new Villainous Company, two characters exchange so many pleasantries – ...
“C-Section, motherfuckers!” Thus does Macduff, in Drunk Shakespeare’s gleefully anarchic rendition of the Scottish Play, announce to his arch-rival that he is “not of woman born.” It’s hardly the ...
How to translate Chekhov? The problem of rendering the richly idiomatic works of the Russian playwright into contemporary English has plagued so many American and English attempts at staging Three Sisters. ...
When I was an undergrad, I went to a college that had a really pervasive date rape problem and is actually now under investigation for covering up rape under Title ...
Tara Isabella Burton couldn’t have had two more contrasting experiences at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms. One show, Omega, was one of the worst she’d seen; the other, Melmoth The Wanderer, was ...
To seek out the Georgian Theatre Festival, Tara Isabella Burton found herself in a world of sparse information, misadvertised shows and, in one case, a set held up by customs. ...
David Greig’s The Events, currently at the Traverse Theatre, is inspired by the Anders Breivik shootings. For all its theatrical brio, argues Tara Isabella Burton, it suffers from a disjuncture ...
