- The Theatre: Spring Preview.
goatTitle-->THE PLAY’S THE THING
Robert Sean Leonard, Jim Belushi, Frank Wood, and Nina Arianda (who made an acclaimed Off Broadway début in “Venus in Fur”) star in a revival of “Born Yesterday,” Garson Kanin’s 1946 comedy, in which . . ....
- John Lahr: Nina Arianda: Actress in “Venus in Fur.”
On September 21, 2009, three days after her twenty-fifth birthday, Nina Arianda, like most ambitious actresses just out of drama school, was making the rounds in New York, looking for work. In a large shoulder bag, she carried her C.V., which listed her graduate-school roles: Gwendolen in “ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: Nina Raine’s “Tribes” and Katori Hall’s “Hurt Village.”
8220;Silence is the unbearable repartee,” G. K. Chesterton once observed. In Nina Raine’s subtle and scintillating new play, “Tribes” (elegantly directed by David Cromer, at the Barrow Street Theatre), silence is the shadow that lends brilliance to the hubbub around the bohemian, intellectual upper . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Alexander Kluge’s “Yesterday Girl,” and Werner Schroeter’s “Palermo or Wolfsburg.”
paragraph class="noindent">In 1962, inspired by the French New Wave, a group of West German filmmakers issued the Oberhausen Manifesto, which called for “the new German feature film.” In 1966, with his first feature, “Yesterday Girl” (Facets), Alexander Kluge (one of the signatories) borrowed the . . ....
- Richard Brody: George Cukor’s “A Star Is Born.”
paragraph class="noindent">George Cukor’s “A Star Is Born,” from 1954—one of the greatest inside-Hollywood movies, featuring a career-crowning performance by Judy Garland—was mutilated by Warner Bros. and released with nearly half an hour slashed from the director’s . . ....
- John Lahr: “Sons of the Prophet” and “Relatively Speaking” reviews.
8220;Ravishing” is the best word for Stephen Karam’s new comedy “Sons of the Prophet” (elegantly directed by Peter DuBois, at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels). At once deep, deft, and beautifully made, “Sons of the Prophet” stares unflinchingly at the Gorgon . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward,” at N.Y.P.L.
Noël Coward claimed that his life was “one long extravaganza”; as if to prove it, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ “Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward” is a lavish, well-curated exhibit about the Master’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Measure for Measure”
8220;The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” one of the courtiers in “All’s Well That Ends Well” says in a piece of throwaway brilliance that reveals Shakespeare’s argument and his theatrical game. The ever-changing . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Princess Noire.”
8220;Princess Noire” was the original, unused title of Nina Simone’s autobiography, and Cohodas duly appropriates it for her account of the singer’s life and career. Simone, born Eunice Waymon and nurtured as a child prodigy, devoted her early years to classical piano. After a . . ....
- John Lahr: “Seminar” and “Private Lives” reviews.
Alan Rickman is the go-to actor for supercilious. Over the years, in screen roles as various as the Sheriff of Nottingham in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” Colonel Brandon in “Sense and Sensibility,” Hans Gruber in “Die Hard,” and Severus Snape in the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” Daniel Talbott’s “Yosemite.”
In 2008, nine years after Margaret Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for her rookie play, “Wit,” she addressed the graduating class of Smith College, her alma mater. She spoke about her lifelong passion for performing, which she called “a physical, breath-based eye-to-eye event.” . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: Pee-wee Herman comes to Broadway.
8220;Turn again, turn again, turn once again,” Tennessee Williams wrote in “Carousel Tune.” “The freaks of the cosmic circus are men. / We are the gooks and the geeks of creation; / Believe-It-or-Not is the name of our star.” Enter Pee-wee Herman . . ....
- John Lahr: Terence Rattigan’s “Man and Boy” review.
For the nearly two decades between his first hit, “French Without Tears” (1936), and his 1954 play “Separate Tables,” Terence Rattigan was the West End’s most successful playwright: according to Geoffrey Wansell’s 1995 biography, two of his plays ran for more than . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: Introduction to Eugene O’Neill’s “Exorcism.”
Before Eugene O’Neill, America had entertainment; after him, it had drama. Born in 1888, the second son of James O’Neill, one of the most celebrated romantic actors of his day, the young O’Neill was a Princeton dropout, a feckless father, a pie-eyed sailor . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “The Mountaintop” and “We Live Here” reviews.
Martin Luther King, Jr., may have had a dream, but it was not to be the subject of a Broadway show. Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop” (directed by Kenny Leon, at the Bernard B. Jacobs) puts the great man in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, in . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “The Tempest” and “Clybourne Park.”
8220;Let me not . . . dwell in this bare island by your spell,” Prospero asks the audience in the epilogue of “The Tempest.” The island he is speaking of is both the ambiguous place where he has been marooned for years and the stage itself. Written in 1611 . . ....
- Books: “In the Land of Believers”
When Welch, a Berkeley native who grew up “thinking I was born an atheist the way some people are born Italian,” moved to Virginia for graduate school, she was forced to confront her inherent fear of Evangelicals. The best way to conquer her anxiety, she decided, was to . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “The Time That Remains” and “Another Year.”
Most of “The Time That Remains” takes place in Nazareth, which is where Elia Suleiman, the film’s writer and director, was born and raised. It was someone else’s home town, long ago, but we hear very little of that, though one resident does remark . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “The Time That Remains” and “Another Year.”
Most of “The Time That Remains” takes place in Nazareth, which is where Elia Suleiman, the film’s writer and director, was born and raised. It was someone else’s home town, long ago, but we hear very little of that, though one resident does remark . . ....
- John Lahr: “Look Back in Anger,” a John Osborne revival.
John Osborne’s rowdy, shocking anger—first broadcast in his play “Look Back in Anger,” which is now in revival at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels—was his trademark, his gift, and his epitaph. “When the bell rings, I not only . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Blake Edwards’s “Wild Rovers.”
paragraph class="noindent">The urbane director Blake Edwards (who died last December, at the age of eighty-eight), best remembered for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Victor/Victoria,” and the Pink Panther comedies, was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Los Angeles. In his only . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “Blood and Gifts” and “Wild Animals You Should Know” reviews.
8220;Circumstances make man, not man circumstances,” Mark Twain once quipped. As proof of his claim, take the smart, well-intentioned collection of political operatives who intervene in the war-torn tribal no man’s land of Afghanistan and make what turn out to be disastrous decisions in . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “The Cherry Orchard,” “Bonnie & Clyde” reviews.
As a stagestruck boy, Anton Chekhov defied school regulations to attend the local playhouse in Taganrog. (He and his friends disguised themselves with false beards and glasses to sit in the gallery.) Later, he came to see Russian theatre as “the venereal disease of the cities.” “I . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “In Masks Outrageous and Austere,” “Clybourne Park” reviews.
Let’s imagine for a minute that you are a director and you’re unhappy with one of Tennessee Williams’s great plays. If you went to one of the archives where reams of his drafts, notes, and outtakes are housed, you would find perfectly readable scenes . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: Rajiv Joseph’s “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.”
8220;War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” Ambrose Bierce joked. In Rajiv Joseph’s “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” (sluggishly directed by Moisés Kaufman, at the Richard Rodgers), it’s also His way of teaching big cats metaphysics . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “True Grit,” “The Company Men,” “Somewhere,” and “The Tempest.”
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ enjoyably astringent remake of the maudlin John Wayne Western from 1969, the characters all speak in formal diction. They abjure contractions (typical sentence: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”), and they avoid the fanciful, “fuck . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “True Grit,” “The Company Men,” “Somewhere,” and “The Tempest.”
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ enjoyably astringent remake of the maudlin John Wayne Western from 1969, the characters all speak in formal diction. They abjure contractions (typical sentence: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”), and they avoid the fanciful, “fuck . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: Rick Elice’s “Peter and the Starcatcher.”
In a review of the 1904 début production of J. M. Barrie’s play “Peter Pan,” the British critic Max Beerbohm wrote, “Mr. Barrie is not that rare creature, a man of genius. He is something even more rare—a child who, by . . . (Subscription required.)...
