We spent 2012 watching live performances—plays, musicals, operas, classical concerts, dance shows, literary readings—wherever we could find them: in Broadway theaters, in the stacks of the Grand Army Plaza library, in a crowded Crown Heights bar, in Central Park, in an old concert hall in Boerum Hill, and everywhere in between. These were the best things we saw, and the companies, actors, organizations and events you should look out for in 2013. [photo]
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 9:00 AM
The production of Golden Boy that opened yesterday, directed by Bartlett Sher, is so perfect in every way—costume, set, performance, direction, script—it's a shock that the play hasn't been on Broadway in 70 years. Hopefully this revival (through January 20), perhaps the best thing I've ever seen on a stage, will help it take its rightful place alongside the great works of 20th-century American drama. This is the kind of work no one writes anymore—it's epic, with three acts and 19 roles, a grand drama about all things: business, love, beauty, violence, family, the whole fucking modern human condition top to bottom, front to back. Allegorically, it attacks the whole fucked up system, the entire goddamn world; at its heart is the conflict between art and war, personified in the unlikely hero: Joe Bonaparte, as good a boxer as he is a violinist, an angry kid forced to choose between making music and throwing punches.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Jim Baldassare
In movies like Funny Games and Cabin in the Woods, the writers grapple with their obligations to their characters—like, is it immoral to hurt them? Maybe if you spend your days writing fiction this can become a pressing concern. But to me it seems insane. Who cares about fictional characters? They're fictional! Yet the same theme preoccupies Alicegraceanon, a new play by Kara Lee Corthron (developed with and directed by Kara-Lynn Vaeni) in which three semi-related literary and historical figures grapple with their characterhood: Alice, of Wonderland fame; Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane; and Anonymous, the hero of Go Ask Alice, the faux diary chronicling a teenager's descent into drug-addicted ruin. (Was anyone ever so naive as to believe it was really real?)
Posted
by Audrey Ference
on Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 10:30 AM
This is not a picture from last night, but this is exactly what he looked like so don't worry.
Last night I saw Louis C.K.'s new show at the New York City Center. It was—get ready for this—very funny. I know! The center itself is huge, nearly 3,000-seats, and it was packed. Going in, my companion spotted James Murphy, looking fuzzy and adorable in a big beard.
John Mulaney opened, which was a lovely treat. Who doesn't love John Mulaney? He was, perhaps, a bit too self-effacing. "Don't worry, I'm not here to see me either." Guy, this Thursday 10 o'clock show sold out the day after it was announced. I think it's safe to say the house is packed with comedy nerds.
In fact, I think I got some of the last tickets, because I was in the second to last row. The rise is dizzyingly steep, and both performers were so foreshortened they looked like pink toothpicks jammed into the stage. Still worth it! Louis came out after a very short opening set, chiding people for arriving late. "You could've done better. You missed John Mulaney and he was funny as shit."
Louis started with a long, very funny thing (I refuse to say chunk, that is just gross-sounding) about how he connects with old ladies. The theme of the evening seemed to be aging and the aged, including Louis himself. "Anyone that I'm not looking at right now might be dead." I'm not going to attempt to explain any of the jokes, because a. that is never funny and b. you probably want to just see it for yourself.
He was interrupted at one point by yelling in the front. Someone yelled shut up, loud enough to be heard all the way up in the faraway seats, so Louis stopped the show to mediate. "Did the usher leave?" he said. "I think an ejection is in order." When the audience applauded, he shushed us. "You aren't helping." He settled a dispute between someone who was mad about someone else talking, and the talking person, who had threatened to fuck him or her up. "So he said he'd fuck you up? No, I'd be upset too." I've never seen a loud talker up front NOT get ejected, but Louis helped them through it and everyone got to stay. ("So are you both okay? Please don't chat during my show. People come here to see me talk, and you are kind of interfering with that, when you are talking at the same time.") If this is how he is with his kids, he's a great dad.
The show proceeded, ranging from more old lady talk, to a long part about tit squeezing that involved the universal one handed tit squeeze gesture, to what it is like to live in a 45-year-old body. He closed with a meditation on murder that was so funny I almost barfed laughing. I know I promised not to attempt to joke-explain, but my favorite line of the night was: "I think the law against murder is the #1 thing preventing murder."
In the quick but effective encore, there was a moment where he seemed like maybe he was going to say something racist, and you could hear the entire audience being like NO DON'T RUIN IT, then what he said was the opposite of racist, and everyone laughed and applauded. Whew. Some people tried to give a standing ovation, but Louis didn't stick around to see it. How someone can do two shows in a night back to back like that and still sound so spontaneous is beyond me. He's a pro.
Near the end of our chat, Annie-B Parson asked me why I thought it was important to talk with artists about their creative process. Whether she intended it, I sensed some resistance in the question, a resistance I think she shares with other artists and that I, as a playwright, have felt, too. I think it's good for certain aspects of a process to be inarticulate or unarticulated. Not because it preserves a romantic notion of mystery or prevents people from having access to the work, but because there is such a drive in our culture to tabulate and quantify and dissect every thing that we do—and much is lost in that process. A great deal ends up being oversimplified or made overly complex when we insist on getting the arts down in words or numbers. The inability to put it into words, the failure of language alone, is precisely why we so often turn to the arts for other modes and means of expression.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 11:30 AM
Stephanie Berger
The choreographer Pina Bausch can break your heart. But in this, the last show she created before her death in 2009, she wants—wanted—to make us laugh. Structured like a Cirque du Soleil show, "...como el musguito en la piedra, ay, si, si si..." features clownish, punchliney, often surreal group interludes ("this is my fish, and I want to teach it to walk. Not swimming—walking!") that punctuate the larger set pieces—not acrobatic feats but dance numbers. It feels like everyone in Pina's troupe, the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, has a personal showcase in this show, not unlike in Wim Wenders's 2011 documentary.
A tale told in mirages, the dance-theater piece Political Mother is accompanied by live rock musicians and military drums. Props—a monster mask, a gun and a sword—are lined up like a series of gritty punctuations within a flip book of tableaux. This melodrama, by UK-based choreographer Hofesh Schecter (making its New York premiere at BAM), bravely outlines a journey of radical individualism in the face of belonging. Iconic-seeming images of a lead singer and a speechifying politician hang fervent alongside a choir of dancers falling in and out of unison. As these images begin to overlap and retract, a pattern of rage, rock and recover seems to drive the work, building to an ending you won’t forget—and, in fact, already know.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 9:44 AM
Theater troupe Elevator Repair Service has become known for its epic, text-respectful adaptations of American modernist classics: The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby. This weekend, the company took those three books and read them aloud as they scattered out through shelves of fiction at Brooklyn's Central Library. Well, sort of. They read excerpts from all three at once, out of order. The actors each carried one of the books; its insides had been hollowed out to make room for a smart phone, on which scrawled clauses, lines of dialogue and full-sentence narrations culled from the three books. An actor might discuss his younger and more vulnerable years before another would mention Robert Cohn's boxing career at Princeton. "If you're tight, then go to bed," one might say. "Dilsey said," another might add.
A playwright writes her play, prints out a nice clean copy, mails it off to the theater, and her job is done. The theater takes it, sprinkles a little fairy dust on top, et voila, presto change-o, a beautiful, Broadway-ready production emerges ready for all the world to behold.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 10:35 AM
members of Elevator Repair Service, which will perform at the Central Library
Brooklyn's first theater festival, the BEAT Festival, kicks off tomorrow: over 12 days, 13 acts will hold 38 performances at eight venues around the borough—in Williamsburg, Park Slope, Flatbush, Red Hook, Coney Island and more. We talked to artistic director Stephen Shelley about the theater scene in New York and how it's moving into Brooklyn.
Why didn't something like this didn't exist already? I think we've reached a true moment of ripening. There are so many performing artists here now that something simply had to happen. I also think that most artists are so fully focused on their own work, that they wouldn't have time and energy to build something like a festival. The attraction for me was to be creative in both a community-building and business way within the performing arts community. BEAT was the perfect project for me.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 9:55 AM
On the set of Picnic. He would never take a picnic in NYC, because there's no grass and it smells like garbage.
One-time MacArthur Fellow and celebrated theater director David Cromer gave an interview to Chicago Magazine in which he trash talked New York—literally! (Sort of?) "There are no alleys in New York," he told the magazine, "which means the garbage is on the street. In Chicago, there's grass everywhere. It's so much quieter and everything smells better." The Q&A isn't on-line, as far as I can tell; he obviously thought we'd never find out all the way in New York!
Posted
by Mark Martin
on Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Let it never be said that the Mobile Theatre Unit is not a delightful name. It conjures up images of dramaturgical first responders speeding through the night to on-stage disasters. (“Quick, Robin, to the Bardmobile!”) To the scene of tragedy, these people bring Tragedy. The Unit—let’s call it that—is currently staging Richard III at the Public Theater (through August 25), following a three-week tour of such hotbeds of dramatic art as Riker’s Island and New Jersey homeless shelters. At these inauspicious locations our selfless thespians ladle out Shakespeare like so much free soup, delivering the good news that among the many things of which the audience has been deprived, it has also been missing out on Elizabethan drama.
The stakes always seem so high in New York City. Too high. For many young artists presenting their work on stages, in galleries, or elsewhere, there's a sense that this is an all-or-nothing town. You get one shot, at very high expense (living costs, venue costs, advertising and public relations fees are much higher here than elsewhere), and as someone who isn't a celebrity or backed by a large institution, you're likely to have small audiences. Add to that the expectation that the artwork you create not only needs to meet outsize financial goals, but also needs to serve some kind of common good or have important things to say about the world, or else engage in serious aesthetic or theoretical conversations with other works of art that, in the vernacular, push the field forward.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 2:48 PM
The late Pina Bausch is to dance as Stravinsky is to music or Picasso to art: a modern warper, an unraveler, of classical forms. As I watched Wim Wenders' documentary last year about the late German choreographer, I was awed. I had never seen people move that way before, blending classical grace with modern angularity, dancers who contort, flail, flop, fall, jerk, carry each other, drag each other, crawl across the floor, collapse in on themselves, get pulled in unnatural directions by invisible forces—or who simply lay face down on the floor, as Orpheus does in the first movement of Bausch's avant-garde adaptation of Gluck's surprisingly familiar opera score for Orpheus and Eurydice, which the Paris Opera Ballet performed at the Koch Theater this weekend as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Such an anguished Orpheus, to match such mournful music.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 1:27 PM
It was chilly in the Rose Theater on Saturday afternoon, which seemed appropriate—I imagine psych wards, at the least the emetically green-tiled kind assembled on the stage, are cold. Directors John Tiffany (Once, Black Watch) and Andrew Goldberg's abbreviated Macbeth, which ended its short run in the Lincoln Center Festival that Saturday, is a (mostly) one-man show starring Alan Cumming in every major part, and set in a mental hospital. It opens with him stripped by two attendants, his clothes packed into evidence bags: this is Macbeth set after the action of Macbeth, with the thane-turned-king reliving his tragedy on a Sisyphean loop.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 10:00 PM
If ever a Shakespeare play were suited to the Delacorte, it's his mid-career comedy As You Like It, set as it is in a forest; it's hard to tell where John Lee Beatty's set ends and Central Park begins, as fake trees recede into the real thing. I mean, really, what work would benefit more from the songs of squeaking birds darting by, or the eventual emergence of flitting insects? In this makeshift urban wood we find a band of followers of an exiled duke, climbing out of trees, ragged and revelrous like Robin's Merry Men. They sing, they dance, they generally delight—and it's delightful, as joyous as when the Peanuts lose themselves to the jazzy rhythms of Vince Guaraldi. Steve Martin's songs—sweet, festive and catchy—employ a folk-country idiom that suits perfectly the woodsy, homespun vibe.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 2:45 PM
For celebrated playwright Annie Baker's new version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (through at least July 22), the small Soho Rep theater has been transformed into a living room—a living room in the most miserable house in Russia. Beige carpet covers everything: the floor, the walls, and the two-tiered risers, where audience members sit cross-legged, pillows at their backs. In this soft, warm and intimate production, directed by Sam Gold, the actors use their ordinary speaking voices, and get so close to the audience you can smell them (Michael Shannon is musky!), can really feel the feeling in Ivan Petrovich and his extended family's grumblings, ruminations, and sufferings of unrequited love: he rails against his past, its misguided passions and its failures. Youth resents age; age resents aging.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 8:59 AM
Kevin Thomas Garcia
"This country was built by giants," one character says in Storefront Church. "They died, and midgets moved in." The latest play from writer-director John Patrick Shanley, and the conclusion to his Church and State trilogy that began with Doubt, is about the smallness of great men and the greatness of small men, about the upside-downness of contemporary American society. It aims no less than to be the Hunchback of Notre Dame of this subprime mortgage-crisis era, a play thoroughly of its time. It may not be such a masterpiece, destined through its timeliness for timelessness, but it is a great play, full of rousing speechifying about the emptiness of wealth, knee-slapping humor, and poignant drama about the unbearable smallness of being, at least under capitalism.
Beasts of The Storm in action, stewing and brewing. Photograph by Jen Plaskowitz.
It's hellblaze, it's hailfire, it's End Times in a woodshire.
It's beast-fest, it's creature talk, it's peril-loom with Wolf astalk.
And it's winds and rains, and hymns and flames, and sylvan news among cauldrons and stews unto potions and motions of Apocalypse brew.
And it's so cleverly timely, and so gravely eternal. It's The Storm: An Apocalyptic Folk Operetta, written by Stuart Cameron, executed by Saints of an Unnamed Country and staged, for two more nights, at Secret Project Robot.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 1:53 PM
"Fights about furniture become fights about the issues that, perhaps, have been buried or ignored for months and years," says Dano Madden, one of the playwrights behind Leaving Ikea, a quasi-paranormal relationship comedy. "Ikea has become a name people simply understand as a maze of exhaustion and relationship hell." 30 Rock even did an episode about it. But this new two-part work by the Artful Conspirators—the Brooklyn-based theater company behind last year's Brooklyn Underground, which was about and performed at Green-Wood Cemetery—has been in development for almost four years, since it won every night at a pitch to an audience of theater concepts called 30 ideas, 3 of them good.
