Robert Israel

Theater Feature: Favorite Stage Productions of 2023

December 31, 2023
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Our theater critics salute the year’s outstanding productions.

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Theater Review: “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” — A Stirring Dramatic Experience

October 25, 2022
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Despite some missteps and miscasting bumps along the way, this staging faithfully captures playwright August Wilson’s searing poetic vision.

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Theater Interview: Tennessee Williams and Censorship

September 2, 2021
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“A lot of censorship in America has to do with the impulse to shut down what women have to say, literally hanging and burning them as witches to shut them up.”

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Book Review: “Cheese, Wine, and Bread” — On the Menu, Confession and Fermentation

April 21, 2021
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The current rage for inserting the personal/confessional in everything from cookbooks to literary criticism can go too far.

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Book Review: John Edgar Wideman — Masterful Stories that Bear the Weight of Reality

April 17, 2021
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A singular muscularity infuses these short stories, a confidence that astonishes.

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Book Review: “Jew-ish: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch” — Nosh Nirvana?

March 1, 2021
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Jake Cohen is “modern” in that he takes a contemporary approach at spreading the gospel; he is an expert at using social media.

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Arts Feature: Best Stage Productions of 2020

December 27, 2020
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Our theater critics pick some of the outstanding productions of a year truncated by COVID-19.

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Arts Remembrance: Terrence McNally — Dramatist and Father of the Serious Contemporary Musical 

March 27, 2020
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The late Terrence McNally was more than just a masterful playwright. He also forged new roads in musical theater.

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Theater Review: “The Children” — After the Damage Has Been Done

March 3, 2020
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An apocalyptic backdrop gives the play urgency, especially given the current worldwide struggle to contain the Corvid-19 virus, which has already claimed thousands of lives.

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Theater Review: “Pass Over” — An Unforgiving World

January 19, 2020
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If one of the aims of art is to create a distinctively imaginative world, than Pass Over succeeds in generating a landscape of devastation, a hopeless place filled with gaping wounds and visible scars.

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