An original British musical is something of a rarity in London theatre, with juke box shows and film adaptations dominating the West End, but luckily we have a thriving fringe circuit that is willing to take risks on such shows, as the Union Theatre has done with ‘The White Feather’. A beautifully touching musical, it […]
Two moderate highpoints of the 2015 Stratford season, Possible Worlds & The Physicists are both works of thematic ambition with refreshing visual flair. Strong casts and well-paced direction help both pieces stand out though neither stirs the heart nearly as much as it attempts to challenge the mind. In John Mighton’s Possible Worlds, a […]
Three singers, two pianists, and a whole lot of Sondheim—a thoroughly enjoyable evening by the AC Group for the avid or even casual fan of the great lyricist/composer, though this charming production is unlikely to convert any sceptics of his extensive catalogue. Quite remarkably, ‘Side by Side by Sondheim’ was first performed over 40 years […]
Thank god for Kate Hennig. In a Stratford season where women are both underrepresented and terribly misused, she’s offered us a heroine ten times as complex as Pericles and two of the most compelling supporting female characters of the season to boot. In a season of dull period pieces and literal interpretation, she’s bent history […]
As I sat at Ted x Broadway last winter. I was baffled as Leslie Koch spoke animatedly about an apparent art oasis stationed in the middle of New York harbor, about five minutes by boat from my apartment. Having lived in the city for three years now, it was unfathomable to me that there was […]
Playwright Kyle Capstick had a lot of great ideas for a new play- a glimpse into the personal stakes of a small theatre company as the life-and-death stakes of WWII loom ever-more-noisily large, an examination of grief and the way we carry on, a poetic contemplation of what makes a kiss more than just an […]
Writing about the Vietnam War, Mary McCarthy identified the slippery motivations hiding behind the conflict’s carefully-constructed terms. To make their methods sound innocuous, the American military referred to napalm as “Incinder-jell,” and to defoliants as “weed killers.” McCarthy observed that this “resort to euphemism denotes, no doubt, a guilty conscience, or—the same thing nowadays—a twinge […]
I have always hated monographs that moonlight as plays or novels or paintings, though I have to make an exception for Future Conditional. It is so unabashed in its stance on education and class that it commands a degree of respect. As a play for many generations, it probably will not be that, but it […]