The new Broadway revival of the musical Jekyll & Hyde feels more like an exhumation of sorts. Some may remember the first time it was here in the late '90s: Despite very little help from critics, it was nominated for four Tony Awards and was kept go...
This spring, Congress is yet again taking up the debate over immigration reform. And for every day politicians spend arguing over the fate of workers already in the U.S., one or two immigrants--and sometimes more--will die just trying to get here. ...
If you were to wander backstage, into green rooms and dressing rooms and the dark spaces of the wings, you might hear performers whispering a cheery, "Break a leg!" They don't mean it. No actor, save a very disgruntled understudy, really wishes disa...
Adoption, a touchy subject in all instances, is the ostensible topic of The Call (Playwrights Horizons), a small, tautly written, tidy--perhaps over-tidy-new play by the gifted Tanya Barfield. And like some adopted children, The Call turns out to be...
Edgar and Alice are soon to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. What would constitute an appropriate gift? Arsenic? Cyanide? A neatly sharpened saber? Never has marriage seemed more devilishly injurious than in August Strindberg's 1900 The D...
Macbeth is one of the loneliest characters Shakespeare ever wrote. He sacrifices everything to his ravenous ambition--sleep, friendship, loyalty, conscience; even, eventually, his loving if twisted marriage--leaving him to enjoy his hard-won ascent ...
There is something both elegiac and death-defying about Gordon Matta-Clark's work. The short-lived Matta-Clark (1943-1978) is most famous for cutting huge sections out of decrepit buildings, graceful forms achieved through the brute application o...
I'd probably be able to discuss Kinky Boots (Hirschfeld Theatre) much more lucidly if I could only figure out in what decade it's meant to take place. The characters use cellphones, but apparently few of them have ever seen a man wearing women's clo...
In 2007, a young Ohio couple with a penchant for role-playing games robbed nearly $8 million from an armored car company and were promptly arrested. Some hailed them as heroes, some as idiots. But only playwright Lynn Rosen recognized them as inspir...
For us--the esteemed members of the Academy seated in the auditorium--the evening's guest lecturer is a small hunched man (Kathryn Hunter) who will recount his former life as an ape. Five years ago, he swung from trees and chomped on bananas. Today,...
Missed out on spring break? Ready to spend a few sun-drenched afternoons on an island drinking Chteauneuf-du-Pape and eating tarte tatin while waiting for romance? Then Eterniday, Witness Relocation's new dance-theater piece (now running at La MaMa...
"I'm not really an opera," says dynamic performer Joseph Keckler at the start of his tantalizing song cycle-cum-multimedia one-man show I am an Opera. "I just said that to intrigue you." Joseph, you tease! If not nearly as overblown as an opera, he ...
Tentatively, I'd say that there might be some good work in Tim Minchin's music and lyrics for the new musical Matilda (Shubert Theatre). I can't be certain, because the score's transmitted, in performance, through Simon Baker's sound design, which I...
The mother of all Great Depression books, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, grew out of a Time magazine assignment. Accepting it were two young artistes, James Agee and Walker Evans, who agreed to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily l...
Every play is a partisan act, giving only the playwright's view of the events it describes. When it's fiction, and the playwright has dreamed up the whole thing, he or she can be cut plenty of slack: It's his or her dream, not ours. The playwright's...
Scots playwright David Harrower caught the attention of American audiences with Blackbird, a sly and agonizing two-character play that revealed a past liaison between an older man and a young girl. It was a tale of sexual abuse that played as a love...
Contrary to many expectations, there is rigorous contemporary art that knocks your block off at first sight. James Nares's high-definition video Street, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Galleries for Drawings, Prints, and Photog...
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 ...
Lee has one day to prepare for the Teen Tap Road Show, but things aren't going well at Martle's House of Dance. Her stepfamily keeps texting they need the car,… More >>
When one reads in the Bible that Joshua burned the city of Ai "and made it a heap forever" and "the king of Ai he hanged on a tree until… More >>
Who would run around on Daniel Craig? Those muscular shoulders, those wintry eyes, that blond mane — is this a man to cuckold? Apparently. Craig has elected to play Robert, the… More >>
The Gaesling family is besieged. It's 1917. Father has recently died, and the Great War in Europe has called elder son Duncan (Evan Jonigkeit) from Princeton's supper clubs to the… More >>
In this week's film section, Calum Marsh interviews author Martin Amis, who has moved from his native Great Britain to New York. On November 4, Amis presents a screening of… More >>
There are at least two ways to see The Landing. You can go into the theater like the terribly boring adult that you probably are, sit down and turn off… More >>
There's much to celebrate and to regret in the Public's Fun Home, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori's faithful, playful, and tender adaptation of Alison Bechdel's graphic novel. Fun Home details… More >>
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 >>