Theater
Recall and Response
Cicely Tyson brings realness to The Trip to Bountiful Broadway’s new Black (or non-traditional cast) production of The Trip to Bountiful comes alive when Cicely Tyson as Carrie Watts, an elderly Texas widow longing to return to her titular hometown, stands up and sings a church hymn in a desolate bus station. It is the...
A Legacy Is Born
Broadway’s Motown means more than it can say Barry Gordy, founder of the legendary record label Motown had to do something. His landmark artistic venture had some of its historic lustre stolen by the lame-brain drama and trifling music of Dreamgirls (which traduced the story of Motown group The Supremes for a cliché-ridden yet widely-promoted...
Romances and Revivals
Two no-holds-barred Off-Broadway love stories. The most romantic fairy tale revival in town right now isn’t Cinderella, but the Roundabout Theatre‘s revival of Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning Talley’s Folly, lovingly directed by Michael Wilson. “They tell me we have 97 minutes here tonight…without intermission,” begins Danny Burstein’s Matt Friedman who then predicts that those...
African Caesar
New take on Shakespearean politics at BAM Julius Caesar doesn’t usually get ranked as one of Shakespeare’s most exciting plays but last year theatergoers in England were given reason to change their minds after seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival, reset in modern Africa, with an all black cast. In its new incarnation, directed by...
Return of the Poet
Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama gets a one night only revival Emmy-award winning composer, Laura Karpman, started thinking about staging Langston Hughes’ twelve-part, epic poem, “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz” when she came across it in a bookstore six years ago. Begun by the great poet in 1960 while attending the Newport Jazz...
Dramatic Personae
The Tavianis Illuminate Reality through Theater Compartive Literature classes were never as exhilarating as the best parts of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die. This ingenious adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, combines documentary and drama as the Tavianis follow theater director Fabio Cavalli guiding a couple dozen convicts through a production of the play...
Golden Idol
Sher’s ‘Golden Boy’ revives Odets’ insights Bartlett Sher continues his investigation of American Theater history with the 75th anniversary production of Clifford Odets’ play Golden Boy. As in his revivals of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and South Pacific, Sher looks at the past in order to understand the present. He reveals that Odets’ story...
Doing the Right Thing
MAMET’S ‘THE ANARCHIST’ EXPLORES OUR SOCIAL DIVIDE Broadway’s newest drama, The Anarchist, proves that David Mamet has not just become a conservative; he’s become a poet. Taking as his inspiration the 1981 Brinks incident where subversives from the Weatherman Underground were convicted for killing a Nyack, N.J., policeman, Mamet examines the motives of political radicals...
Gordon Edelstein: The Actor’s Director
By Susan Farkas Gordon Edelstein likes to kibitz. He’s just arrived at a Ninth Avenue restaurant from a preview of My Name is Asher Lev, a play he’s directing, and he spots an old friend, an aging actor, hobbling with a cane. “Now I know I’m in a classy establishment!” he calls to him and...
Broadway’s New Normal
By Leslie (Hoban) Blake WHY BROADWAY IS SEEING STARS Once upon a time, New York theater actors aspired to be discovered so they could be whisked away to Hollywood, usually never to be seen onstage again. From Bogie and Cagney to Brando and Streisand, this was a one-way street—although a few like Henry Fonda, Melvyn...
Careering from Career to Career
‘SCANDALOUS’ BRIDGES SHOWBIZ AND RELIGION The key line in Scandalous, the Broadway musical version of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s career, takes on the show’s stumbling block. Teenage Aimee growing up in rural Canada confides to her father, “I hate religion but I love theater!” The show itself tries to have it both ways. Its prime...
In Search of Lost Jazz
‘COTTON CLUB PARADE’ BRINGS BACK MUSICAL HISTORY Cotton Club Parade opens with the robust Jazz at Lincoln Center All Stars, directed by Daryl Waters, swinging into “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “I’ve Got the World on a String” and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” offering a tantalizing taste of what’s...
Crying Woolf
Tracy Letts Takes on his Mentor Edward Albee in New Production Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? returns to Broadway in a 50th-anniversary production from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Tracy Letts and Amy Morton will appear in the iconic roles of George and Martha, a middle-aged married couple locked in terminal, tragic combat...
Survival of the Arts
Ellie Covan’s Dixon Place is Home for Culture Just before a recent performance of Dan Fishback’s musical The Material World (held-over, full house, many turned away), Dixon Place’s omnipotently attractive founder/creative director Ellie Covan took the stage to thank “those of you in the audience who are holding drinks” and then warmly encouraged everyone else...
BAM Takes Shape
Melillo enables artists and audiences Responsive and initiating in just the right proportions, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), at 38 Lafayette Ave. in Fort Greene, seems inextricably linked to its home borough, with BAM’s offerings—all the performing arts, cinema, a café, even hosting Memorial Day weekend’s sprawling outdoor African bazaar—radiating and refining the scrappy...
Art Adverts Start A New Wave, Part 2
Advertising strategies take art out the wilderness. CityArts surveys the new media tacticians who bring Broadway shows, museums and other art venues to popular attention. Art and its patrons all benefit from millennial art advertising new tactical strategies. Second of two-part series. When Clint White, president of New York’s WiT Media and lecturer at Sotheby’s...
Art Adverts Start a New Wave
Advertising strategies gearing up for next season take art out the wilderness. CityArts surveys the new media tacticians who bring Broadway shows, museums and other art venues to popular attention. Art and its patrons all benefit from millennial art advertising’s new tactical strategies. Part 1 of a two-part series. New Yorkers with long memories can’t...
Monologues and Madness
Tulis McCall’s no-pressure cabaret In the midst of the overpriced, dull landscape that has become Greenwich Village stands the Cornelia Street Café, a survivor from an earlier era when audiences discovered young Bob Dylans and Maya Angelous. Monologues and Madness, a monthly event in the Café’s basement, restores that now-rare glow of discovery. Founded and...
Broadway’s Baby
Fun with the Gypsy in Jonathan Groff’s Soul Each spring, New York’s musical theatre community puts on Miscast, a benefit where the performers enact show tunes they could never have been considered for. This year, Jonathan Groff, the talented ingénue from Spring Awakening and Hair, has grown up and literally tapped into his inner Sutton...
How Tony are the Tony Awards?
‘Clybourne Park’ questions American and theater history If the award for Best Play goes to Clybourne Park at the June 10 Tony Awards ceremony, will it put the Tonys on “the right side of history”? That particular aphorism entered popular speech during the 2008 presidential campaign (in a rare Obama reference to Dr. Martin Luther...
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Tennessee’s Quiet Storm
Transforming the Classic ‘Streetcar’ Nicole Ari Parker has a triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire that our mainstream media and the cli-quish Tony Awards are ill-equipped to handle. Parker’s ravishing, statuesque presence and intelligent skill make the play what it always ought to have been: a genuine contest between America’s sexual and political hypocrisies; social...
