Theater

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 »

Barack Obama may have won the presidency, but Hillary Clinton has hardly disappeared from our consciousness. Will she be our next Secretary of State? Would she have more influence in the Senate? Or is she too junior there to wield the kind of power she'd have in the cabinet? For the past sixteen years, since Bill Clinton first touted his marriage as a twofer of leadership, Americans have examined his wife's choices, no matter how minor or how grand.

Mia Barron, who plays the lady herself in the new off-off-Broadway show HILLARY:  A Modern Greek Tragedy With a (Somewhat) Happy Ending, which is playing now at the Living Theatre (located, fittingly, on Clinton Street), cops to her share of the scrutiny.  read more »

The reviews of the opening of David Mamet's American Buffalo at the Belasco have been unenthusiastic. The critics almost unanimously describe poorly cast stars—John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer, and Haley Joel Osment—going through the motions with wooden dialogue. ("Ssssssssst. That whooshing noise coming from the Belasco Theater is the sound of the air being let out of David Mamet's dialogue," wrote Ben Brantlee in The New York Times.)

But signs that the play might lay an egg were already in evidence last Friday afternoon at Café Une Deux Trois, where a press lunch with the cast had been scheduled. Instead of excited actors ready to begin the new Broadway run of a perfectly timed critique of inflated valuation, a near empty restaurant, and a sheepish hostess greeted the Daily Transom.  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 »

The New York Stage and Film Company held their Winter Gala at Capitale on the Bowery on Monday, a day of the week when theaters are traditionally dark. Actors gathered to raise money for its residency program—a "safe space," artistically cozy and warm, where actors and directors could go to develop new plays unmolested by the public eye and the tyranny of the New York Times critics. "It's the only place I know where I can go and work as an artist and not be judged," said actress Julianna Margulies.

How were the attendees—all of whom were employed in theater, television, and film—anticipating the downturn affecting the entertainment industry?

"Obama has other matters to attend to," said board member and Desperate Housewives cast member Dana Delany, wearing her trademark black-rimmed glasses and a cranberry party dress. "That's why we have to fund the arts in the private sector."  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 »

Wicked, Broadway’s longtime top-grosser, celebrates the fifth anniversary of its opening tonight with a colorful commemoration: departing from their signature yellow, the mastheads of the show’s Playbills will be printed in green, according to Broadwayworld.com. A tribute to the famously verdant skin of Elphaba, Wicked’s witchy heroine, the revamped programs will be the first in history that Playbill has specially tailored for a particular performance.

Tonight’s show caps off a week of high-profile birthday festivities for the show  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 »