Mesmerizing: The Mesmeric Revelations of Edgar Allan Poe
The number of shows that I’ve been to that sweep you up into a world so complex, so narratively tight and visually arresting and thematically overwhelming…is exactly three.
A Pirate’s Life for She
How do women maintain their authority aboard a ship of men unaccustomed to taking orders from the would-be fairer sex – other than, in the evening’s strongest segment, on Mary ...
Enter the Dollhouse: Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic
Its pastiche is as ambitiously diffuse as a night at the Ziegfield Follies itself – and if the production as a whole veers towards the disjointed, its sins are – ...
Boy Meets Girl Meets Poisonous Plant: Belladonna at the 92nd St Y
Knowledge may be power. But in Belladonna, a “Rappaccini’s Daughter”-inspired dance piece from Adam Barruch and Chelsea Bonosky, too much power can be toxic. Inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, ...
An Uneven Weaving: Bottom’s Dream’s The Ghost
Perhaps fittingly, Bottom’s Dream’s The Ghost – like the two Shakespearean tragedies of power on which it is based – feels like an ...
The Horror of Edgar Allan Poe: Nevermore
A wildly exciting musical biopic on America’s master of macabre.
Film Chinois: Down the Rabbit Hole
A Chinese femme fatale and an American tea trader feature in this noir-inspired drama. But is it anything we haven’t seen before?
Dostoevsky, Distilled: Dmitri and the 3000 Kopeks
An extraordinary, exciting re-imagining of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov at the IRT.
Ceremony and Complicity at Serenade
Writer-director Ava Lee Scott’s dynamic and personal production tests the limits of actor-audience interaction, though a few kinks remain.
James Earl Jones on Broadway: You Can’t Take It With You
Splendid set-pieces and screwball antics feature in this Kaufman & Hart revival. Take your in-laws.
Gigi: Love, Sex, and Commerce in Fin de Siecle Paris
In many ways, the Storm Theatre/Blackfriars’ Theatre revival of Gigi (adapted by Anita Loos from Colette’s novella) is as simple as its teenage heroine herself. Located in a fifty-odd seat ...
A Civility! too civil
What price freedom?
Euripides’ The Bacchae is a savage tale of mothers murdering children mistook for beasts, orgiastic pleasure and religious ecstasy that comes ...
Haunting: The Power of Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet
A starchild searches for a home. A love-lorn woman seeks revenge on the lover (and sister) that wrong her. A father and son duke it out over the dinner table. ...
The Discreet Charm (and Criminal Underworld) of the Bourgeoisie: Villainous Company @ The Clurman
How polite do you have to be to the person interrogating you?
In the first half of Victor Cahn’s slickly-paced new Villainous Company, two characters exchange so many pleasantries – about ...
Provokers of Drink: Drunk Shakespeare
“C-Section, motherfuckers!”
Thus does Macduff, in Drunk Shakespeare’s gleefully anarchic rendition of the Scottish Play, announce to his arch-rival that he is “not of ...
Chekhov, Revisited: What We Know
How to translate Chekhov? The problem of rendering the richly idiomatic works of the Russian playwright into contemporary English has plagued so many American and English attempts at staging Three Sisters. ...
Where There’s Smoke…: In Conversation with Kim Davies
When I was an undergrad, I went to a college that had a really pervasive date rape problem and is actually now under investigation for covering up rape under Title ...
Litro in Edinburgh: Omega and Melmoth The Wanderer at the Assembly Rooms
Tara Isabella Burton couldn’t have had two more contrasting experiences at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms. One show, Omega, was one of the worst she’d seen; the other, Melmoth The Wanderer, was ...
Arts & Culture, Litro in Edinburgh
Litro in Edinburgh: The Georgian Theatre Festival
To seek out the Georgian Theatre Festival, Tara Isabella Burton found herself in a world of sparse information, misadvertised shows and, in one case, a set held up by customs. ...
Arts & Culture, Litro in Edinburgh
Litro in Edinburgh: David Greig’s The Events
David Greig’s The Events, currently at the Traverse Theatre, is inspired by the Anders Breivik shootings. For all its theatrical brio, argues Tara Isabella Burton, it suffers from a disjuncture ...