Don't bother bringing tissues to Far From Heaven, the chilly musical adaptation of Todd Haynes's 2002 film. Haynes updated a classic Douglas Sirk weepie, trading Sirk's class concerns for racial and sexual themes. Set in 1957 Connecticut, the story ...
As Mando Alvarado's The Basilica (from the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater) grinds on past one tragic, hard-to-accept plot development, and Joe (Felix Solis), a crumpled beer can of a dad, bellows drunkenly at God, audiences, too, may feel like bese...
Five middle-aged men and one woman trapped in a room together is never a bad place to start. Set in a drab hotel conference space, Rhea Leman's Gorilla concerns a group of corporate misfits who have been marked as poor performers and the straight-fa...
First it was slow food, the European social movement that made Ronald McDonald quit Rome's Spanish Steps in the 1980s. Then came slow gardening, slow traveling, slow fashion, slow media, and slow parenting (Park Slope helicopter moms take note). Isn...
Theaters are haunted places. Specters are said to lurk in dressing rooms, phantoms in the fly space. Even the most unsuperstitious houses leave ghost lights burning. Earlier productions haunt each new revival and new plays must shake off the wraiths...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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 >>