The best thing about John Carney’s latest musically saturated film is the music itself (some classics like Duran Duran plus quite a few originals). The plot is fairly tired (teenage misfits start a band to impress a girl) and the characters fairly conventional (troubled bad girl, disillusioned big brother) but the music, boy, the music […]
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In an election year that has redefined crazy, at least the stage provides some refuge from politics. Well, at least until I found out I was seeing Primary. Et tu, theater? Et tu? Primary, written by Gracie Gardner and directed by Alex Keegan, won the annual Project Playwright Competition, where scenes from a handful of […]
Annie Baker’s The Flick is of a radical theatrical style; it is new and maybe even profound. This is lofty description but it is a rare and wonderful thing when a play’s best moments consist in the absence of dialogue. With director Sam Gold and cast, Baker creates a genuinely new mode of storytelling. Undoubtedly, […]
This month we were treated to two pieces that weren’t really musical theatre, nor were they strictly concerts. They were cabarets, I guess, but they were really stage-bound musical explorations of people and place by musicians who make theatre and theatre people who make music. Ryan G. Hinds’ Say Grace Sidelined for 6 months […]
Heather Litteer is not a stripper or a prostitute or a junky who will go to any length to score a fix – but, as she explains at the beginning of her new play Lemonade, she plays one on television and in films. Litteer’s autobiographical play explores her disappointing type-casted acting career as a sexualized […]
I have only 4 rules when it comes to great theatre: – make it coherent – make it honest – make it mean something – limit blackout set changes That’s it. That’s all I ask. The following three companies refuse to adhere to this final point with their current productions and it’s perhaps telling […]
It’s been a very uncomfortable week for me as an Asian-American media consumer. It started Tuesday, with the new Doctor Strange trailer, continued Thursday as stills of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell emerged, and concluded Saturday, when I had to stop my Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt binge after the unbearably self-satisfied episode, “Kimmy Goes […]
We Three is a collaborative new work by Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman with a clever title inspired by the Henry V speech a character passes off as “a poem she wrote”; a speech about brotherhood forged in shared experience and unshakeable as years pass. If only the bonds between modern women were as simple as those between Shakespeare’s soldiers, […]