- Alex Ross: The Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival
W. H. Auden, toward the end of his life, sometimes attended services at a Russian Orthodox church near his home, in the East Village. “Thank God, though I know what is going on I don’t understand a single word,” he told a friend. The remark was . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Race @ Ethel Barrymore Theatre
Ruthlessness of a rhetorical kind is part of the fun of David Mamet’s new play (directed by the author), his latest exercise in contrarian provocation. “Do you know what you can say? To a black man. On the subject of race?” Henry Brown (David Alan Grier), a black lawyer, says to Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), a rich, white potential client who is accused of raping...
- Hilton Als: “Vaginal Davis Is Speaking from the Diaphragm,” at P.S. 122.
There are certain artists the stage cannot contain, and Vaginal Davis is one of them. Attending a Davis show—they’re generally solo, but she’s always up for audience participation—may bring to mind Truman Capote’s remark about Tallulah Bankhead: her vitality was . . ....
- The Met: Armida @ Metropolitan Opera House
Battered but unbowed, Mary Zimmerman, who has directed two of the Met’s most controversial recent productions, returns to stage Rossini’s seldom heard “Armida,” a lustrous adaptation of Tasso’s poem “Gerusalemme Liberata” that was written to open the rebuilt Teatro San Carlo in Naples, in 1817. Renée Fleming rules the stage in the title role,...
- Hilton Als: David Henry Hwang’s “Chinglish” review.
First-generation American writers often have two stories to tell. There’s the story of their inspiration and the quest for a discipline to give form to their imaginings. Then there’s a more constricted tale: the arrival myth. How did my parents get here from Hungary or . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
MOVIES
HOME AND AWAY
April 11-17
The theme of the New York African Film Festival, at Film Society of Lincoln Center, is “21st Century: The Homecoming,” a rubric that incorporates such films as Rachid Bouchareb’s “Outside the Law,” about three Algerian brothers in postwar . . ....
- Hilton Als: “Early Plays” by Eugene O’Neill, “CQ/CX,” “Rx” reviews.
The director Richard Maxwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Early Plays” (at St. Ann’s Warehouse) has the supreme realism of a dream. It is happening, and sometimes you don’t want it to happen, but you’re powerless to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Alex Ross: A Bruckner festival at Lincoln Center.
At this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival, the Cleveland Orchestra undertook the semi-superhuman task of performing, over the course of five days, the Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies of Anton Bruckner, the outwardly humble Austrian organist and professor who possessed a musical imagination of frightening intensity. The . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Joan Acocella: The “World of Tap Dance,” festival, at the CUNY Graduate Center.
The “World of Tap Dance” festival, which will take place July 6-7 at the CUNY Graduate Center, is a celebration of tap on film, a phenomenon that started when the talkies did. Before then, tap wasn’t recorded; indeed, the same has often been true since then . . ....
- Hilton Als: Diane Keaton’s “Then Again.”
Part of what makes Diane Keaton’s memoir, “Then Again,” truly amazing is that she does away with the star’s “me” and replaces it with a daughter’s “I.” Writing in a collaboration of sorts with her late mother, Dorothy . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lincoln Center Festival: “Varèse: (R)evolution II” @ Avery Fisher Hall
July 20 at 8: Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic—who, in the wake of “Le Grand Macabre,” have acquired some modernist street cred—take up several of the bigger works, including “Ionisation,” “Nocturnal,” and the thrilling, extravagant “Amériques.” (Avery Fisher Hall.) (212-721-6500.) July 20 Lincoln Center, New York,...
- Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
THE THEATRE
FAMILY DYNAMICS
Oct. 12
Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities,” which was a hit for Lincoln Center Theatre at the Mitzi E. Newhouse last winter, comes to Broadway’s Booth Theatre. A cast led by Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Judith Light, Thomas Sadoski . . ....
- Hilton Als: James Rasin’s documentary, “Beautiful Darling.”
Candy Darling was a movie star’s dream of what a movie star should look like. Born in Forest Hills, Queens, in the nineteen-forties, Candy was raised as James Slattery in Massapequa Park, Long Island, during the nineteen-fifties, when the world wasn’t exactly ready for . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: Laurie Metcalf in “The Other Place,” at the Lucille Lortel.
All too often actors are limited by their looks. Generally, we get “sexy” when a female performer trades on her own desirability, and “rugged” when a reasonably handsome guy takes the stage with a few days’ stubble. But what about those who have more to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: “My Man Godfrey,” “Sullivan’s Travels,” “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” on DVD.
paragraph class="noindent">The blithering rich at the center of many Depression-era white-tie-and-tails movies are depicted mainly as callous villains in Gregory La Cava’s comedy “My Man Godfrey” (new on DVD from Universal), from 1936. The title character, played by William Powell . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Joan Acocella: Sets from Balanchine, at the Drawing Center.
Balanchine didn’t care much about the visual arts. There’s a story that Lincoln Kirstein, who founded New York City Ballet with him, once invited him to go to a museum. “No thanks,” Balanchine said. “I’ve been to a museum.” Today . . ....
- Hilton Als: Maria Callas haunts the stage in “Master Class.”
I’m not really much of an opera queen. When, among my gay male friends of the eighties, the talk turned to opera seria versus the “reform” operas of the mid-eighteenth century, say, or opera buffa and its influence on England’s Savoy operas, I . . ....
- Books: Natalie Dykstra’s “Clover Adams” review.
Born in 1843 to a wealthy, intellectual Boston family, Marian (Clover) Hooper moved in the most illustrious circles of nineteenth-century America. Henry James called her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats”; Henry Adams married her. In Washington, she became a celebrated hostess, rode horses, and, at the age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Alex Ross: The “American Mavericks” festival.
In 1911, Hervey White, the founder of the Maverick Arts Colony, in Woodstock, New York, published an epic poem entitled “The Adventures of Young Maverick,” in which he extolled a wild horse, “free from the ownership of any master.” White’s utopian activities probably hastened . . . (Subscription required.)...
- New York Phil “Summertime Classics”: “La Dolce Vita” @ Avery Fisher Hall—New York Philharmonic
July 6-7 at 7:30: This start-of-summer series, a throwback to the heyday of “light classical” fare, has been a going concern under the likable Canadian conductor Bramwell Tovey since 2004. The first of two final programs, “La Dolce Vita,” celebrates not Italian cinema but the country’s operatic triumphs, with arias and orchestral excerpts by Rossini, Puccini,...
- Hilton Als: Taylor Mac, at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
The performer, playwright, and star Taylor Mac is too young to have appeared in James McCourt’s essential 2003 book, “Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture: 1947-1985,” but, should there be a subsequent volume, Mac would certainly be front and center. Ever since . . ....
- Books: “The Dead Republic.”
Doyle’s ninth novel, the concluding volume of a trilogy that began with “A Star Called Henry,” chronicles the return to Ireland, after almost thirty years of exile in America, of Henry Smart, a former I.R.A. assassin. The first section, in which Henry works with John Ford . . ....
- Joan Acocella: David Gordon’s “Dancing Henry Five.”
David Gordon has always been postmodern dance’s premier minimalist. So you could say he was almost showing off when, in 2004, he took on Shakespeare’s “Henry V”—with its massed armies, its take-charge king, its pretty princess—and made his own . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Emily Nussbaum: “Archer,” “Eastbound & Down” reviews.
8220;Archer” is a fleet, filthy sitcom, an animated half hour about a spy who is convinced that he’s the center of the universe. Created by Adam Reed, the series, on FX, blends James Bond plots and “Mad Men” looks, then marbles in the surreal . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” and Barack Obama’s White House.
If the United States is one big book club, and sometimes it feels that way, then the White House must have been hoping that this would be the week when everyone was talking about “The Rogue,” Joe McGinniss’s much ballyhooed takedown of his erstwhile Alaska neighbor . . ....
- David Denby: Sidney Lumet’s “Prince of the City”
Of Sidney Lumet’s trilogy of films about police corruption in New York—“Serpico” (1973), “Prince of the City” (1981), and “Q. & A.” (1990)—the middle film (screening on July 24 at Film Society of Lincoln Center) is probably the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “The Graduate” at Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Despite its abject flattery of youth and its sour slander of anyone over thirty-five, Mike Nichols’s “The Graduate” (1967) is still funny. Dustin Hoffman’s virginal panic when the leggy Anne Bancroft methodically bullies him into bed is a classic of mimicry, almost Harold . . ....
- Hilton Als: “La Cage aux Folles” and “Sondheim on Sondheim.”
What makes the director Terry Johnson’s utterly absorbing revival of “La Cage aux Folles” (at the Longacre) so subversive is the way he insures that the straight characters in the musical have no real power on the stage. His method is as direct as the plot . . ....
