John Heilpern

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 1989. With the rising anxiety about our economic future, the celebrated play and its genteelly feuding Southern characters have become more poignant. But only the prescient Mr. Foote, who ranks among America’s greatest playwrights, would make his point so charmingly in the unobtrusive manner of Chekhov.

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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 its near-nudity, the work as a whole achieves a miraculous theatrical purity. As with the naked simplicity of Peter Brook’s 55-minute The Grand Inquisitor, Ms. Clarke’s 60-minute production is complete and amounts to a revolutionary statement.

There’s isn’t—praise be!—a video screen in sight. Garden of Earthly Delights isn’t yet another movie effect or virtual reality in the horror vacui of today’s desperate techno-theater.  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 dollop of sentiment with social fury.

The groundbreaking Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change (2004) had the fury, but—too bad for its chances of Broadway success—was too emotionally refined. Billy Elliot takes no prisoners. It’s an unabashed tearjerker and a fairy tale, an unusual hybrid of stardust and coal dust.  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) in favor of an unmediated, utterly natural stage magic.

For a generation, Mr. Brook has been described as a guru of theater and one of its greatest directors. But no one appears to be listening to him.

It’s almost impossible not to see a new production today that isn’t in some way trying to be an onstage film—an alternative reality, or a simultaneous video.  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 to be engaged.”

In his production of The Grand Inquisitor, adapted from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a man—the Grand Inquisitor—walks across an empty space while someone else—Jesus—is watching him. And so the play begins.

Mr. Brook, you might say, has arrived at the point where he began.  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 for his espousal of free market self-interest and greed. Profit (at any cost) is the theme of Speed-the-Plow, though the renowned dramatist put it differently in his Sept. 3 New York Times article, “Drama that Brings Home the Bacon,” which rationalized and plugged his play, and left me wondering about his sanity.  read more »

Simon McBurney, the avant-garde theater director, is the only director I’ve ever seen to take a bow not only after his own shows, but before. It wasn’t always so in the earlier days of Complicité, his London-based troupe with the French name. But the more successful Mr. McBurney has become, the more his vanity has gotten out of hand.

His preening custom of introducing his own productions before the curtain rises manages to upstage his cast and has been known to include embarrassing requests for audience participation. I’ve also seen him called up onstage post-performance to take a most reluctant bow along with his actors (thereby upstaging them once again).  read more »

Feeling low? Can’t cope? Unable to sleep at night, what with the global financial crisis and all? Why not visit the Roundabout Theatre for a nice, long nap?

The Roundabout’s sleepy revival of Robert Bolt’s old chestnut, A Man for All Seasons (1960), not only leaves you dozing contentedly. It offers the additional pleasure of making you feel spectacularly virtuous for being there in the first place.

Bolt’s dusty costume drama about that original maverick, Sir Thomas More (beheaded, 1535), is mostly a middlebrow bore masquerading as a play of ideas. The thick, sanctimonious air hovering over Doug Hughes’ plodding production isn’t helped at all by the righteous Playbill quotation from Bolt’s original script:

“It should be remembered,” we’re pompously advised, “that A Man for All Seasons deals with ‘an age less fastidious than our own.  read more »

It’s a pleasure to be in the company of the entire cast of Ian Rickson’s revelatory production of The Seagull. Let me throw my hat in the air at the outset and hail it as the finest production of Chekhov I’ve seen in a generation.

The production at the Walter Kerr on Broadway began at the Royal Court Theatre, and Mr. Hickson’s use of British and American actors works uncommonly well. There’s none of the usual culture clash of either accent or manner; nor any poeticizing of Chekhov’s text (a traditional weakness among British actors).

It’s a cliché of theater that there are no small parts, only small actors.  read more »

It’s good to have Peter Shaffer back on Broadway with Equus. Whatever the flaws of the watershed 1973 psychodrama that became one of his biggest international successes, Mr. Shaffer reminds us of the lifeblood that’s being drained from the theater: the power of articulate ideas and ritual.

Like all his major plays—The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Amadeus (1979)—the confrontation between two male protagonists in a war between ecstatic instinct and colder reason is found at the center of Equus. In Lettice and Lovage, his delightful 1987 stately home comedy written for Maggie Smith, he reversed his own convention and had two women fight for ascendancy, one of them a nutty fantasist, the other a conformist mediocrity.  read more »

I once asked in this column, with typical modesty, who you would vote for as the best drama critic in town. Taking a wild shot in the dark, who, my children, is the wisest, wittiest of them all?

The answer is … Gerard Alessandrini.

And you thought it was me! (You always do!) But I know my place. Put simply, Mr. Alessandrini is the best and funniest critic of Broadway musicals in history. He’s the creator, writer and co-director of my favorite show on earth, Forbidden Broadway, and I love the guy.

I always think understatement works best, don’t you? But no show has consistently given me more pleasure over the years than Mr.  read more »

David Pittu’s What’s That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling, at Atlantic Stage 2, is an affectionate, somewhat familiar, campy spoof about a perpetually aspiring Broadway composer who has no talent. It’s billed as a World Premiere. Small world, isn’t it?

Campy parodies of bad musicals are as current as the kitschy celebration of the third-rate in Xanadu, while long-forgotten musicals are frequently elevated to cult status by City Center’s Encores! series. The show queen’s scholarly delight in Broadway flops is the theme of the recent hit Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone (the sendup of a forgotten 1920s musical whose model was Sandy Wilson’s delightful 1954 pastiche The Boy Friend).  read more »

There was a lot of talk last season about the new Broadway beat of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Latino musical In the Heights (which became a multiple-Tony-winning hit), and Stu’s cult rock show Passing Strange (which didn’t). Mr. Miranda’s breakthrough musical was first staged at 37 Arts, the small, uninvitingly cold theater on West 37 Street where Bill T. Jones’ ambitious Fela! has opened the new season.

The Wall Street Journal recently asked the legendary Mr. Jones if he’d like to take his musical to Broadway.

“Yes, of course,” he replied, for Broadway’s seductions are weirdly eternal. But he cautiously wondered if the paradigm of the Great White Way is truly shifting.  read more »

Why do we go to the theater? Put it another way: Why, oh why, do we go to the theater? It frequently frustrates and disappoints us. And it’s expensive. Yet we keep going, come what may.

But look at it from the point of view of the people who work in theater. It frequently frustrates and disappoints them. And it’s expensive for them, too, because as a general rule of thumb they’re criminally underpaid.

Theater folk are the ones who subsidize the theater the most. So I was delighted by a peach of a line about their fatal attraction to a precarious life, one that comes in the last minutes of A.  read more »

The Public Theater’s smashing new revival of Hair (1967) in Central Park is a joy from beginning to end. It’s just the best, though fans of South Pacific (1947) might not agree with me.

I felt about Lincoln Center’s loving revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific that while the audience seemed to be in heaven, I was in a retirement home. But Hair is different. Hair is my South Pacific.

“The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical”—to give its glorious subtitle—was the first show I ever saw with performers onstage who were my own age. It’s the musical that spoke directly to my 1960s generation, though there’s another particular affection I have for it: For reasons nobody’s ever been able to figure out, Hair’s stoned hero—Claude Bukowski from Flushing, Queens—likes to pretend he’s from Manchester, England.  read more »

The thing about the plays of Samuel Beckett is that while I’ve read a number of fine books and scholarly essays analyzing them, and fancy I can grasp what a state of “non-being” is, and even the fuzzy meaning of a “non-play” for that matter, the truth is much simpler in my case: Beckett’s plays never fail to make me feel absurdly, wonderfully miserable.

Which reminds me of my favorite anecdote about the great man: He was walking with a friend in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on a beautiful sunny day. “You know, Sam,” his friend said spontaneously. “It’s days like this that make you feel glad to be alive.  read more »

The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Christopher Durang’s dark 1985 comedy about his own nutty family that has received a sparkling revival at the Laura Pels Theatre, is a peculiar pleasure.

Mr. Durang has furtively written a tragedy disguised as mad farce. His famously absurdist comedy is good-natured and grotesque, and awfully sad, especially when it becomes alarmingly clear that his apparently adorably eccentric family is more or less insane.

That we might easily find ourselves identifying with Mr. Durang’s lunatic cast of characters is all to the good. The Marriage of Bette and Boo is the modern comedy about dysfunctional American family life (predating by a generation the excesses of August: Osage County).  read more »

My excited interest in the production of The Bacchae during the Lincoln Center Festival was less about Euripides, good though he is. It was my admiration for the dynamic creative team who’ve taken a few liberties with the play (which premiered successfully in 405 B.C.).

The National Theatre of Scotland’s John Tiffany, The Bacchae’s director, and the leading Scottish playwright David Greig, who adapted it from a literal translation by Ian Ruffell, are the immense talents responsible for the modern masterpiece about Scottish soldiers in the Iraq war, Black Watch. I sang the praises of that production unreservedly last season, singling out its fantastic imaginative daring and simplicity.  read more »

Notes for and against Macbeth 2008, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, hailed by some as a theater visionary:

I think the avant-garde Polish director should have given his contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy a different title.

Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece, is famously based on Macbeth, but its title takes us directly into another world. Set in medieval Japan, the movie uses very little of Shakespeare’s language. Mr. Jarzyna’s Macbeth 2008, which has been compared to watching a movie onstage, is set in a blood-soaked U.S. war zone, and the director rarely uses Shakespeare’s language either. But his title links this production too closely to the original play, and sets up unfounded expectations.  read more »

Let me begin at the end.

Place: Central Park. Time: almost 11:45 p.m. Play: Hamlet. Spirits: low.

Fortinbras and his army have entered Denmark at last, signaling the end. Hamlet has just died—poisoned in the duel scene—and is probably glad to be out of it. The king, the queen, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—all now dead. Only decent Horatio survives—someone, according to W. H. Auden, who’s “not too bright, though he has read a lot and can repeat it.”

Oskar Eustis’ disappointingly literal production had been an uphill slog, and I mistakenly assumed the director would end in the conventional way: At Fortinbras’ command, four captains bear the body of Hamlet away like a soldier.  read more »

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman,” the interviewer begins genially, indicating a figure now entering dramatically from the wings. “The great American sculptor … Louise Nevelson.”

The audience applauds as if on cue. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Nevelson says. She’s alive?! You can’t tell the difference. You’re not meant to. Nevelson is being expertly impersonated by Mercedes Ruehl, who’s wearing a sort of kimono, sculptural necklace and trademark sable eyelashes (a set on each eye, lower and upper).

Where are we?

We’re in the Signature Theatre on 42nd Street. But we could be in a TV studio; the ingratiating interviewer could be James Lipton; the audience could be some kind of adoring, curious fan club; and, yes, Louise Nevelson could be alive and very well.  read more »

And so to the moment the nation and Patti LuPone have been waiting for—the Tony Awards on CBS, Sunday, June 15, at 8 p.m. What a great night it’ll be for Ms. LuPone and the diva’s devoted followers known as LuPonistas. It better be! But first things first:

Who do you think is going to take home the Tony for Best Sound Design of a Musical?  read more »

There’s a drama critic in every man (and woman, of course). Audiences can be pretty severe critics, and, in private, theater folk can be, too. An actor-writer by the name of Mike Daisey is a rarity, however: He goes onstage to criticize theater publicly.

And it pays off, apparently. Mr. Daisey’s How Theater Failed America has now moved from Joe’s Pub to the Barrow Street Theatre downtown, and judging by the enthusiastic response he received on a recent Saturday night, a lot of people are enjoying hearing him tell us how badly theater is doing.  read more »

It’s understandable if you think British theater holds up a burnished mirror to the bourgeois in the audience. Theater revolutions come and go, but no one absorbs them better than the spongy, resilient middle classes of England. For centuries, British theater has been dominated by the image of a white middle-class country. When have we seen a black or Asian character in the plays of Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn and David Hare?  read more »

If you ask me—and please do—who I’d like to see take home the Tony for best actor this season, it would be a genius named Mark Rylance.

Mark who?  read more »

When we think of the British playwrights we’re most familiar with, one is a political conservative for the thinking classes (Sir Tom Stoppard), another a safe middlebrow socialist for the carriage trade (Sir David Hare), and another a working-class sentimentalist for Off Broadway (the un-knighted Mike Leigh).

Where does that leave Caryl Churchill—the unrepentant Marxist-feminist poet who’s for nothing less than social, political and theatrical revolution? In my view, she’s England’s greatest living playwright.  read more »

I disagree with the critics who feel that Laura Linney has been miscast as the infamous sexual predator the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Ms. Linney’s controversial performance in the erratic Roundabout revival is living very dangerously indeed. Its unyielding ice coldness is overstylized, riveting in both its originality and waywardness, and ultimately a self-negating mistake, like an experiment in the wrong venue. But which other actress on Broadway, I wonder, is as daring as Ms. Linney?  read more »

And so it’s back to the ’50s (again). “All plays are dated,” Harold Clurman wrote in steadfast support of Clifford Odets in 1970. “They are products of their time.” Yes; but everything depends on how much the dated-ness shows.

In the current Broadway revival of Odets’econd to last play, The Country Girl, it shows too much. Odets himself described the play as superficial, and he is correct. Even Clurman, who first produced the revolutionary conscience plays of Odets in the 1930s when they worked together at the Group Theatre, conceded that The Country Girl is more about the actors in it than the play—or potboiler—itself.  read more »

And so, back to the ’50s (again), with the consciously modest Broadway musical A Catered Affair.

Modesty doesn’t really suit Broadway; it implies “good taste,” discretion, refinement, art—Stephen Sondheim. The British director of A Catered Affair, John Doyle (of the recent minimalist Broadway revivals of Mr. Sondheim’s Company and Sweeney Todd), has treated what’s essentially a wheezing old potboiler as if it were a mini-opera. It’s a rare thing on Broadway in that sense: a tearjerker that induces no tears.  read more »

It’s no secret that much of our theater is living nostalgically in the 1950s. Coming to a theater near you: The Dancing Eisenhower Years. And why not?  read more »

Call me a cockeyed pessimist. While everyone else in the audience at Lincoln Center’s loving revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 South Pacific seemed to be in heaven, I thought I was in a retirement home.

Now, now … before I’m drummed out of town, let me say that the score is an unequalled romantic gem. But you know that.  read more »

Whether you’re seeing Gypsy for the first (or fourth or fifth) time, you’ll want to catch Arthur Laurents’ revival starring Patti LuPone at the St. James Theatre. For one thing, Gypsy is among the very best musicals ever written, and we assume that by now the 90-year-old Mr. Laurents—who created the masterly book in 1959, and is directing the show for the third time—knows what he’s doing.

He’s like a museum keeper with the only set of keys. When Sam Mendes directed the revisionist Gypsy with Bernadette Peters on Broadway five years ago, traditionalists took offense (including, reportedly, Mr. Laurents). Don’t mess with Mama Rose! (Or else.) Gypsy, the musical for people who hate their mothers, arouses intense feelings.  read more »

You might want to think twice about seeing Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? at the Public Theatre. The radical politics of the distinguished feminist playwright aren’t giving me pause; it’s the $50 tickets that trouble me.

I’m no mathematician, but by my reckoning, $50 for an evening lasting 45 minutes amounts to $3,852 a minute. If you ask me—and please do—that’s outrageous. It’s a lot. Facts don’t lie.  read more »

It’s a funny old job being a critic. Each week, I confidently—fairly confidently—offer a point of view about a show. Yet if someone asks me personally what show to see, I wish they wouldn’t.

I don’t want to feel responsible if they have a horrible time. Only recently some friends of mine from out of town were planning a Broadway treat for the family and asked what I thought about Spring Awakening. I replied without thinking, “You’ll love it.” Because I did.  read more »

It’s amazing that choreographer Debbie Allen’s starry Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—the first all-black version—can have so much plain wrong with it, yet still delight me. But consider this: No great playwright ever wrote so badly and so beautifully within the same play as Tennessee Williams (unless it was Eugene O’Neill).

I love Williams in spite of his flaws and because of them. He’s our poet of tender mercies who put onstage the large, damaged hearts of the dispossessed.  read more »

In Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone, there’s a wonderfully ghoulish true story about a cell phone that started ringing inside a coffin.

It happened in Belgium some five years ago: The grieving family of the deceased had gathered at the funeral parlor to say a private, loving farewell around the sealed coffin when they suddenly heard a cell phone ringing inside. (What makes it worse—or funnier—is that the badly shaken family subsequently sued the undertakers for negligence).  read more »

This week I report on a new musical about suicidal depression, a new play about suicidal loneliness and the revival of a classic play that hinges on suicide. And how are you today?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the novel theme of Next to Normal, the soft-rock musical about the middle-class mom who’s a clinically depressed pill freak. Sitting across the aisle during the performance I attended at Second Stage Theatre was Stephen Sondheim, the founding father of the modern musical: urban desperation and neurosis (Company); the ravages of time and old age (Follies); Grand Guignol murder (Sweeny Todd); love and physical ugliness (Passion); lunatics and presidential slaughter (Assassins); or even newly opened diplomatic relations between isolationist America and the Japanese in 1852 (Pacific Overtures).  read more »

Rupert Goold’s production of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart has arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from London, where it was widely acclaimed as “definitive” and “the experience of a lifetime.” Though the gifted Mr. Goold’s opening scene is brilliantly unnerving, I’m not so sure that a Macbeth that doesn’t go on to terrify you can be one for the ages.

“All is the fear and nothing is the love” is the keynote of Shakespeare’s dark, monstrous tragedy of political ambition and desire.  read more »

Why are New Yorker writers so stage-struck? Betrayed, George Packer’s adaptation of his 16,000-word New Yorker feature of the same name that exposed the U.S. government’s shameful indifference to the fate of its loyal Iraqi employees in Baghdad, is a memorable contribution to downtown’s Culture Project. It’s Mr. Packer’s first play, and it’s a trend.

Only a year ago, The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, made his stage debut at Culture Project in a solo performance of his own script, My Trip to Al-Qaeda. At this rate, Anthony Lane will be performing his collected movie reviews. And why not? Henry James was famously stage-struck and look what happened to him. (All his plays were a bust.)  read more »

What makes people laugh? Or, as David Mamet’s hapless President Smith asks in November, “Well, who’s to say what’s perjury?”

In a moment of mock seriousness during Mr. Mamet’s broad—very broad—political farce, the president’s speechwriter, who’s an activist lesbian known as Bernstein, muses sentimentally on this great nation of ours and on the mysterious nature of comedy itself:  read more »

Is it a new day in America with Barack Obama?  read more »