You might assume that the Photoshop fantasias of our age would make the visual conundrums of Ren Magritte's pre-war paintings feel quaint. Certainly the beguiling originality of his fractured figures and enigmatic objects has been obscured over the...
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 their own. Even the sincerest dramatic effort makes a three-card...
Who knew Supreme Court justices have such complicated, libidinous inner lives? Anthony Kennedy muses on adults-only car washes. Sandra Day O'Connor contemplates pornographic videos. Antonin Scalia obsesses over nude opera. These racy reveries appear...
What homeless diva recently threatened to commit suicide if her rich patrons didn't cough up $20 million by the end of the year? That's right--the New York City Opera. So if you find it incongruous that the organization's potential (and possibly tem...
The ardor animating the latest Romeo and Juliet seems less the marriage of true minds than the commingling of hot bods. In David Leveaux's revival at Broadway's Richard Rodgers, Orlando Bloom, 34, and Condola Rashad, 26, halve their ages to play doo...
"Are celebrities the new art stars?" asked a Newsweek cover story in July. A few months later, certain windy developments (or popcorn farts) that passed for world-shaking events on TMZ and CNN answered in the affirmative. In the wake of Miley Cyrus'...
The game Lotera can best be described as a Mexican version of bingo, but instead of numbers, each card bears a striking image, such as beautiful sea goddess La Sirena or ominous skull La Calavera. In Mario Alberto Zambrano's debut novel, Lotera, i...
Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Life and Times: Episodes 4.5 and 5--at this year's Crossing the Line Festival--are the newest installments in an epic performance depicting the life story of Kristin Worrall, one of the company's collaborators. Previous ...
An agreeably minor comedy in both scope and key, Ethan Coen's Women or Nothing opens with a surefire farcical premise and then, to its credit, refuses to fire the surest shots. Gretchen and Laura, a pair of moneyed lesbians eager to have a child, op...
Ruins are the remnants of man-made architecture: once-complete structures collapsed into timeworn bits through lack of upkeep or deliberate destruction. Think of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Tikal--or the burned carcass of 20th-century modernism, for that...
In 1969, during his exile from boxing, Muhammad Ali starred in a Broadway musical, Buck White. A tuneful spoof of the black power movement, the show included the songs "We Came in Chains," "Mighty Whitey," and "HNIC." Ali played the titular lead an...
Is it tragic that tens of millions of people's entire conception of Gilbert & Sullivan comes from a minute or so of silliness on a Simpsons episode? Or is it laudable that The Simpsons, once our culture's smartest pop phenomenon, at least managed to...
It's unusual to review a show after only seeing about a tenth of it. But All the Faces of the Moon, master monologist Mike Daisey's epic new serial project--now playing at Joe's Pub--defies many dramatic norms. Daisey is syncing theater's rhythms t...
Horton Foote began writing The Old Friends in 1963 or '64, as a sort of sequel to his early play, Only the Heart. Between '64 and Foote's death in 2009, something like 30 of his new plays saw full productions. The Old Friends never did. There's a r...
Ever had a friend whom you both love and love to hate? One who feels like a parasite sucking at your soul, but whom you can't cut loose, because, ultimately, you need them more than they need you? A study in the complexities of friendship and cla...
Despite its title, The Machine isn't really about Deep Blue, the supercomputer that famously beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. As rendered by Matt Charman and bombastically directed by Josie Rourke at the Park Avenue Armory, the story i...
Nestled in a central gallery on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, between rooms containing seminal works by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol, "Walker Evans American Photographs" consists of approximately...
Being from Western Massachusetts myself, I was excited to sample The Hill Town Plays, Lucy Thurber's cycle of five dramas set amid the hamlets and college towns west of Boston and east of the Berkshires. The series, produced by the Rattlestick and r...
Actor-director-playwright Regina Taylor's quasi-experimental stop. reset. (Signature Theatre) takes place in the offices of the awkwardly named Alexander Ames Chicago Black Book Publishers, a business faintly reminiscent of the Johnson Publishing Co...
Although it's double-stuffed with counts and balls, with duels and scandal and exquisitely described hunting parties, with idealists debating affairs of state and gambling rakes caught in dumb, doomed love, Mikls Bnffy's sweeping Transylvanian Tri...
A sense of humor about the macabre, as well as a love for the underbelly of American society pervades "Zoe Strauss: 10 Years," a survey of Strauss's work currently open… More >>
Many among the crowd that gathered around a patch of graffiti on the corner of a vacant, crumbling building in Tribeca earlier this month had no clue why they stopped… More >>
What do you picture when you hear the word magician? Maybe David Copperfield. Or a birthday party. "Magic suffers from the people who do magic," Derek DelGaudio says. DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães,… More >>
Sometimes, a few well-delivered laugh lines are what makes a production tick. Other times, though, straining for levity strikes a sour note—especially when the subjects at hand are rape, murder,… More >>
Fictional characters are such hapless creatures. Doomed to lives composed of unfortunate choices, secrets, and tragic flaws, their faith supported by mere circumstantial evidence, they flounder in the footlights. These… More >>
Classic Stage Company’s new production of Romeo and Juliet—ably directed by Tea Alagić—has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, some of its virtues are double-edged. It’s admirably uncluttered: The sparse… More >>
When Sean O'Casey put pen to paper for Juno and the Paycock, the 1924 Dubliner domestic drama set against the ghastly Irish Civil War, the playwright's country was in a… More >>
Odd that a play so steeped in loneliness should burst with such life. The Team's RoosevElvis, a stirring, absurd, and grandly human historical-cosplay road-trip fantasia, centers on a depressed North… More >>
The Roundabout's Broadway house specializes in well-upholstered revivals. Few come better carpeted, curtained, and papered than The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan's 1946 play about a family seeking justice for a… More >>
As David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette begins at Soho Rep, actors array tiers of delectable pastel macarons. You might be tempted to snatch one. Restrain yourself. Adjmi is a playwright with… More >>