Jimmy Breslin was right: There is no more beautiful sight than a heaving street full of people. In Havana, on a sun-baked afternoon, that sensuous humanist observation goes double. Picture a Times Square flash mob mugged by the hurly-burly of New Or...
From a certain vantage point, it's hard not to suspect that stage veterans Lois Smith and Frances Sternhagen have been living parallel lives--a suspicion that only gained credence when, at this year's Obies ceremony, Meryl Streep presented them with...
It was the worst of years; it was the best of years. I've never felt as much frustration and agony while theatergoing as I did during 2012-13, nor such a strong feeling that the theater was on the verge of collapse. So was the world around it: Explo...
A few years ago, a playwright, a director, and seven actors sheltered together in a disused bank vault far below Wall Street. Huddled behind a thick door that cell-phone service couldn't penetrate, they imagined themselves as survivors of a nuclear ...
James Turrell June 21-September 25, 2013 From the Museum of the Hard to Believe: Light and earth art pioneer James Turrell has not had an important survey exhibition in the U.S. since 1984. That glaring omission will be remedied this summer wh...
Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments By Gina Perry | New Press | September 3 We all think we know the notorious Milgram experiments of 1961--but that's because we believed what we were told....
Yanira Castro/a canary torsi: The People to Come June 25-29 Yanira Castro's 2009 Bessie-winning Dark Horse/Black Forest involved fraught duets in a lobby restroom at the Gershwin Hotel. For The People to Come she invites audiences to participat...
When David Byrne dances he seems both absorbed in the movement of his body and detached from it, torso and legs vibrating rhythmically, face oddly expressionless. In his recent book, How Music Works, he describes his terpsichorean style as "jerky...
With his aviator shades, shoulder-length locks, and blas good looks, Jack Goldstein could have fronted some '70s band you don't quite remember. In actuality, the Montreal native who grew up in Los Angeles was part of the first graduating class at C...
Audiences love obsessives. Set a character with a crazy, unquenchable hunger center stage and they eat it up, whether the character's hunger is for money, love, fame, or anything else. The public can often develop an unquenchable appetite of its own...
Did you order a side of magical realism with your moo goo gai pan? Is that a dash of absurdism in your tom yum? In Roland Schimmelpfennig's The Golden Dragon, a brisk, fantastical drama nominally set in a "Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese fast food restaurant...
Is Off-Broadway a galaxy far, far away? Stars effervesced Monday night, when theatrical luminaries and icons of TV and film thronged the East Village's Webster Hall to honor theatrical excellence blocks and boroughs distant from the Great White Way....
Painters, even the most experimental ones, continually time-travel for inspiration. Right now, you can traverse half a millennium of painting within two dozen blocks on the Upper East Side. Begin with a conclave of panels by Piero della Francesca...
Samuel (Rocco Sisto), the central figure of Richard Foreman's new work, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance) (Public Theater), has a problem. Not a major problem--those were dealt with in Foreman's 1993 creation, Samuel's Major Problems. But a...
Mike Bartlett's vicious Bull, a nasty one-act dissection of office politics mapped onto a bullfight, represents a companion to his earlier Cock (2009), a full-length battle royale of sexual politics whose form refers to cockfighting. Is Story, abou...
What if composer Nikolai "Nicky" Nabokov, choreographer George Balanchine, composer Igor Stravinsky, designer Sergey Sudeikin, and a host of ex-wives, dancers, pianists, and the odd State Department official all gathered for a weekend on a Connecti...
In the office lexicon, are there words more demoralizing than "corporate retreat"? Not for employees of Skyline Travel, the decaying agency at the center of Steven Levenson's workplace comedy Core Values. In headier times the company would take its...
The sunshine. The palm trees. The dashing leading men. The lissome starlets. The spangles. The elephants? As you may have guessed, Ayub Khan Din's new musical Bunty Berman Presents ..., a mash note to the movies, takes place somewhat east of Hollyw...
Ever fancy yourself a politician? Perhaps a much-beloved mayor, or a city councilor staunchly shepherding your hometown along? If so, seize the chance (no campaign necessary) at City Council Meeting, a new participatory performance created by Mallor...
When you go home after living abroad, you inevitably leave part of yourself behind. If you were living in a different language, there are zesty idioms and forceful exclamations for which you now find no native equivalent--and maybe that means whole ...
"Confidential." That was the beguiling subject of an e-mail seemingly randomly addressed to the Village Voice in mid-September. "I represent the artist Banksy," the message began, "and I would like to talk… More >>
There’s something stupid about the ongoing condemnation of Millennials happening now in our culture. You know, the one that asks questions like: "Why are Generation Y yuppies so unhappy?" and… More >>
Jonas Wood's new paintings present seemingly straightforward scenes—rooms devoid of people, a poker tournament on TV—that front for dazzling formal invention. In some pieces Wood focuses on his childhood home, yet… More >>
Adriano Shaplin's gonzo epic Sarah Flood in Salem Mass blends Our Town and The Crucible with verve, slang, and hallucinogenic beaver stew. (Yes, the Wooster Group did it first—minus the… More >>
If the effigies of famous Yankees sluggers at Madame Tussauds aren't lifelike enough for you, cross 42nd Street to watch Eric Simonson's Bronx Bombers, a veritable walking-talking wax museum of… More >>
If Broadway musicals had trailers like movies, the one for Big Fish might go something like this: Meet Edward Bloom! He's a father and a husband with a big heart—and… More >>
What happens to a political play that's three decades old? Can it keep its emotional charge, or does it wither when its social relevance fades? You may be asking these… More >>
You might assume that the Photoshop fantasias of our age would make the visual conundrums of René Magritte's pre-war paintings feel quaint. Certainly the beguiling originality of his fractured figures… More >>
The theater is a swindle, an exercise in sham. Every play operates on principles of treachery: Flimsy set pieces substitute for solid spaces; people assume names and accents other than… More >>
Provocations don't come much gentler than Ain Gordon's Not What Happened, which concluded a brief run at BAM's Next Wave Festival. A meditation on truth and historical accuracy, directed by… More >>