Meredith’s voiceover brings us right into season twelve of Grey’s Anatomy. She sets us up for a new McDreamy-less life by saying, “I’ve been here before, this is old hat…but everything has changed.” As the episodes progresses, I’m realizing that really nothing actually has changed. Right away, we see the same tension between Meredith and […]
In his director’s note for The Alchemist, Stratford Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino makes a preemptive strike against the argument that he should have set the early seventeenth century play in “our own era”, saying that it adds “a needless layer of complexity to an already challenging text”. Intriguing defensiveness aside, the problem with this statement […]
CBS’s new sitcom Life in Pieces is just Modern Family without the diversity. They really really don’t want you to think that, but it’s true. It’s derivative and palatable and simple and sometimes very and sometimes very not funny… just like Modern Family. And, just like Modern Family, it’s about an extended family and their […]
Director Michael Almereyda’s thrilling new film adaptation of the strange and semi-obscure Shakespeare play Cymbeline begins with three words on the screen- “Keep Your Head”. It’s the name of the production company and a reference to the eventual demise of one of the characters (a brutal death that, because Cymbeline is all over the place […]
The ten-episode first season of the new TVLand sitcom Impastor sped by with the unmistakeable momentum of a pretty good show in the late weeks of summer. It was consistently fun but never really great, bolstered by a strong cast and a definite lack of competition. A strange tonal mix of Stars Hollow-esque small town […]
Quantico had my favorite pilot so far this season (although I have to admit that Scream Queens is a close second). I’m a sucker for whodunit mysteries and I love a good flash forward/flashback. ABC has a way of over-utilizing the basic plot of “this is what’s happening now and let’s go into the past […]
Before the show even started, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins immediately won me over. I was at the BCA, ready to watch a performance of appropriate, the New England premiere of the play and a SpeakEasy Stage Company production directed by M. Bevin O’Gara. In the program notes, Jacobs-Jenkins pointed out how revealing laughter can be as […]
As I toiled at my college dorm desk in December of 2006, cursing my political science methodology thesis, my classmates were breaking dorm policy by blaring music during quiet hours. Not just any music – the same iTunes playlist that had been on repeat all day. Most type A personalities would have been infuriated, but, […]