Theater
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May 27, 2013
They both started out as poor girls from the provinces, entered politics through their husbands and developed celebrity-style fame as well as its attendant bad habits. They were both compulsively quotable and known, in the fashion of their day, for padded shoulders and immovable hair. There the similarities would seem to end between Ann Richards, the late, one-term Texas governor, and Imelda Marcos, the ousted first lady of the Philippines (still alive in...
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May 13, 2013
If an author’s affection for her characters were sufficient to create good drama, Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy would be a masterpiece. This sprawling, splashy, new Broadway infotainment arrives less than a year after the death of Ephron, who also penned iconic rom-coms like “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” It administers a sloppy wet kiss to the rough-and-tumble tabloid journalism of New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s, and its heroes are...
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There’s a classic bit of advice for actors: Walk into the audition thinking of yourself as the solution to the director’s problem; be that solution and you’ve got the part. Closing the deal is a steeper challenge for the cutthroat salesmen in David Mamet’s 1983 masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross, now getting a gripping if lopsided Broadway revival starring Al Pacino. The customers these salesmen go after—mostly offstage, with one telling exception—must be convinced they have a problem...
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November 19, 2012
Absurdly tall wigs held aloft by stage wires. A talking sheep. An 18th-century queen who speaks like a modern-day valley girl. Acclaimed playwright David Adjmi’s “Marie Antoinette” is no typical look at the guillotined French royal.
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November 19, 2012
Every now and then, a good film or play can gain an added resonance when it coincides with current events. Lisa D’Amour’s portrayal of two destructive marriages, Detroit, is enjoying a sold-out off-Broadway run at a time when its eponymous city is in the public eye. The Tigers made it to the World Series; one of its native sons ran for president; and a documentary about its challenges is playing in movie theaters (see pg. 26).
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October 1, 2012
The movement of people from one country to another, which is one of the principal characteristics of globalization, has been an inescapable part of the Irish consciousness for more than a century and a half. “No custom has been more native to the country than getting out of it,” wrote the critic Terry Eagleton of Ireland’s sad history of emigration, in which her greatest export was her sons and daughters. An unexpected chapter of that story is now being written after the demise of the Celtic...
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August 27, 2012
This year the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., which for 25 years has given pleasure to some 2.5 million theatergoers, won the Tony Award for regional theater. In holding that honor the company joins two earlier winners: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. Shakespeare is much appreciated, read and performed in the United States.
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July 16, 2012
This year the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., which for 25 years has given pleasure to some 2.5 million theatergoers, won the Tony Award for regional theater. In holding that honor the company joins two earlier winners: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar...
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May 21, 2012
The claim of “relevance” is nearly irresistible to some critics and other performing arts boosters, particularly those who fret about the health and future of theater in an age of Netflix and the 24-hour news cycle. The notion that this or that classic play is “still relevant”—or “more relevant than ever”—competes with the discernment of a work’s “universal themes” for most shopworn critical cliché.
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May 14, 2012
Porgy and Bess,” a slimmed down “Broadway musical” version of the 1935 opera by George and Ira Gershwin, has been running at the Richard Rodgers Theater since January. And despite some mixed reviews and an early controversy, set off by Stephen Sondheim over proposed changes to the original script and score, the public has flocked to see it. In...