The new musical Hands on a Hard Body (Atkinson Theatre) opened just as City Center's Encores! series revived the 1966 musical It's a Bird . . . It's a Plane . . . It's Superman. The two make an intriguing study in contrasting ways to write a musical...
It's March, but a zigzag of skiers still winds its way down Corkscrew, Aspen Mountain's double-black-diamond run. This is the view from Justice Snow's, an unpretentious restaurant and bar tucked into the Sheridan Opera House, where James Salter is t...
Adam Cost is at a Basquiat exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery, a rare trip for him into a world he's never been welcome in or belonged to. But for the legendary graffiti artist, that may have to change. "I'm trying to be more legit, so I want my stuff ...
As a girl in County Cork, the Irish actor Fiona Shaw walked past a statue of the Virgin Mary every day on her way to school. She didn't care much for the sculpture--"this revolting statue, this mass-produced blemished virgin with marble all around"-...
Bill T. Jones could not be busier this week. His 30-year-old ensemble, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, just opened "Play and Play," a two-week season at the Joyce, studded with new and repurposed dances, many set to live music by the Orion S...
Julius Caesar Performances begin April 10 The last time the Royal Shakespeare Company graced our shores, they brought five shows and an entire multilevel theater with them. This time around, they're packing just a bit lighter. Gregory Doran, t...
King of Cuba By Cristina Garca, May 21 Set partially in modern Havana, Garca's sixth novel offers a profane, rollicking sendup of a dictator on his deathbed--a buffoon transparently redolent of Comandante You Know Who. Our first introduction...
Palermo: Works on Paper 1976-1977 April 25-June 29 As noms d'artiste go, he had a ringer. Born Peter Schwarze, the adopted Peter Heisterkamp was rechristened Blinky Palermo by his teacher Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf. Beuys, it...
Stephen Petronio Company April 30-May 5 His inspirational evening-length work, Like Lazarus Did, sets Petronio's fleet, fluid contemporary dancers loose to an original score by Son Lux, performed live by members of Bon Iver, yMusic, and 30 mem...
Robert Arneson (1930-92) was an incorrigible provocateur. You might recall his notorious 1981 memorial for slain San Francisco mayor George Moscone: all proud teeth and wavy hair, the larger-than-life bust brilliantly parodies an adman's dream of af...
Christopher Durang's new play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Golden Theatre), which has just transferred to Broadway from its Lincoln Center run, shows you one key difference between critics and audiences. Audiences need only to enjoy a play;...
No exaggeration: I coughed hot soup out of my nose while reading the new hardbound volume of deadpan dadaist Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed to Thrizzle (Fantagraphics; $24.99). The strip that did it was one of the book's last, an alt-historical...
What happens when F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson? Welcome to Kristopher Jansma's debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, a literary fun house that follows an unreliable narrator on his quest to write the next Great American Novel. T...
New York audiences are well accustomed to seeing nudity on the stage, but witnessing a man's junk ripen into a rock-solid boner has got to be a first. Before incriminating the Baruch Performing Arts Center for endorsing public lewdness, it should be...
Well, first you'll want to know about the star: sleek of hair and body, effortlessly graceful, vulnerable and jaded by turns, but perhaps rather tubbier than anticipated. I speak, of course, of the cat in Breakfast at Tiffany's, played on the night ...
During This House, James Graham's sly, acerbic survey of government tumult throughout 1970s Britain, one politico remarks that parliamentary democracy "is one of the few things this country has manufactured and exported that hasn't been sent back." ...
Although the band broke up three decades ago, Abba continues to reverberate across cultural frontiers. Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has cribbed the title of the Swedish pop giants' final album, The Visitors, recorded when the foursome was dis...
A quote I often find myself recalling comes from the sociologist Erving Goffman: "Nothing exists like another person for bringing alive the world within oneself." Goffman, whose writings greatly influenced some key theater figures of the 1960s, incl...
For Ann Richards, a Depression kid who rose to become an outspokenly liberal Democratic governor of Texas, everything in life was a challenge by which she refused to be fazed. A whip-smart woman with an epigrammatic, country-accented tongue and a no...
Target Margin, the experimental theater company led by artistic director David Herskovits, never takes the easier route when a twistier one presents itself. Take the title of its latest work, a translation of Peretz Hirschbein's Yiddish play Di Pust...
In 1588, Queen Elizabeth rode to Tilbury and delivered a speech rousing the troops against the Spanish Armada. "I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble… More >>
Depending on who you are, Eternal will seem endlessly fascinating or flat-out boring. Director Daniel Fish has recorded two actors (Christina Rouner and Thomas Jay Ryan) on two channels of… More >>
Holocaust humor: a tricky genre, best attempted with truly revelatory material or not at all. And in the case of Donald Margulies's The Model Apartment—a dark comedy about survivors, revived… More >>
Out with the samovar, in with the Irish folk tunes! We need new forms! In keeping with the make-it-revolutionary spirit of Anton Chekhov's tormented young artist character Constantine, Culture Project's… More >>
Inside the Metropolitan's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor galleries is the perviest art exhibition to be found anywhere in New York: "Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations." The canvases on… More >>
"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 Tussaud's aren't lifelike enough for you, cross 42nd Street to watch Eric Simonson's Bronx Bombers, a veritable walking-talking wax museum of… More >>