Review
Must age diminish a great poet’s strengths? If I grant that age has such power, I’m left to ponder the truly strange fact that death does not.
In this delightful production of “Candide,” director Mary Zimmerman imaginatively reworks and mischievously augments the musical. Her deliciously blowzy approach embraces, with charming lyrical fervor, the sheer preposterousness of Voltaire’s sardonic fable.
“The Lady With All the Answers” presents the columnist Ann Landers as a person who just might write a letter to Ann herself. Her faith in herself and her work is unquestioned, even as her own life takes a bump or two. Well, really, only one bump.
The impressive cast and lovely, atmospheric design of the Lyric Stage production cannot completely overcome the flaws of “Big River,” but they make the trip a scenic, often amusing, and enjoyable theatrical journey.
The American Repertory Theater’s juggling/removal of the operatic elements in “Porgy and Bess” is clumsy, but the goal is to create a compelling entertainment for contemporary audiences, smoothing out the melodramatic story’s edges and cutting its length.
I wouldn’t be writing this review or asking you to read this book if I didn’t believe that McLane were up to something far more radical and also far more difficult to reckon with—something I am not even sure I can account for. The most significant quality of the poetry in “World Enough” is a profound and unapologetic ambiguity.
THE FUTURE, director/actor Miranda July’s followup to 2005’s ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW is brave, unexpectedly poignant and devastatingly sad.
On bad days, I tell people that as far as I’m concerned, New York museums can all go to hell until one of them gives more substantial attention to Fairfield Porter as well as to give a solo show to Jane Freilicher.
Dramatist Jason Grote spins a postmodern, political variation on Scheherazade in his play 1001, and while it skimps on the imaginative playfulness of other versions, its time-tripping allusiveness has a scruffy intellectual charm.
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