Month: August 2012
This daring musical version of “The Merchant of Venice” provides a fascinating re-imagining of a classic play that explores many of the themes and tropes of the original more deeply than many modern productions do.
Read MoreMatt Bunsen and the Burners proves that comedic music can not only be funny, but also well-crafted and artful commentary.
Read MoreHelen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.
Read MoreIn the heartrending “Three Strong Women,” award-winning novelist Marie NDiaye infuses her Senegalese women characters with a personal sense of dignity and a strong belief in self.
Read MoreWhen the performance ended and I sat there, silent, reveling with the rest of the audience in the goose bumps that inevitably occur after such an experience, I knew, in my bones, that no movie, however good, could be as good as this.
Read MoreThere are plenty of amusing moments when dramatist Charles Busch makes effective use of his gift for exaggerated wit and whimsy — no dramatist can drop the word ‘canasta’ with as much hilarious finesse.
Read MoreOf course, I have no idea what was in Corot’s mind. But the juxtaposition of these images appears to me to present two different moments in time, perhaps adjacent ones, perhaps as close as possible, like adjacent frames of a film.
Read MoreDissident artist Ai Weiwei speaks for an alternate China, another possibility for it. In a sense, he is the anti-Mao. Alison Klayman’s “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” is an essential introduction to his work to date.
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Theater Commentary/Review: A Not So Dumb “Month in The Country”
Given the Russian writer’s modernist pedigree, should director/playwright Richard Nelson and translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky be punished for putting some “unevenesses” into their staging of Turgenev’s finest play, “A Month in the Country”? I think not.
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