TFANA’S Scandinavian Rep: 'A Doll’s House' and 'The Father'
I started June off with an interesting event. Did you know that “Strindberg wrote The Father as a direct rebuttal to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House,” as Theatre for a New Audience’s publicity has it? I...
View Article'Nora' ('A Doll House') – BAM, 2004
[I’ve just posted my report on the Scandinavian rep at Theatre for a New Audience (see 13 June), which included performances of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and August Strindberg’s The Father. In...
View ArticleParks Up & Parks Down
“CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK: PROMENADING IN NEW YORK, 30 FEET UP”by Adrian Higgins[The following article on New York City’s High Line Park is from the “Style” section of the Washington Post1 December 2014....
View Article'Shuffle Along' (Redux)
On 23 May 1921, an odd little musical fillip opened atDaly’s 63rd Street Music Hall, 22 West 63rd Street in Manhattan, “a theater of no consequence on a street of no consequence” about ten blocks above...
View ArticleRe-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1885 through 1902
by Kirk Woodward[About two months ago, Kirk Woodward wrote me that he was “going to read all six volumes of [Shaw’s] ‘Collected Plays and Prefaces.’” He was taking notes as he read, he said, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Anatomy of a Broadway Flop”
by Michael Paulson[The following article was published in section C (“The Arts”) of the New York Times of 23 June 2016. “Anatomy of a Broadway Flop” is presented as a sort of theatrical post mortem of...
View ArticleDispatches from Israel 7
by Helen Kaye[Last spring, my friend and frequent ROT-contributor Helen Kaye sent me a couple of her Jerusalem Post reviews, but I was so loaded on the blog at the time that I couldn’t shoehorn them in...
View ArticleRe-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1901 to 1909
by Kirk Woodward[This is part 2 of Kirk Woodward’s series, “Re-Reading Shaw,” his commentary upon reading all six volumes of the playwright’s Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company,...
View ArticleTwo Looks Back
(Play Reports from Rick’s Archives)LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL(2006)[In my recent report on Shuffle Along, Or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed (posted on 28...
View Article'Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme' (Lincoln Center Festival 2016)
Molière may be more popular with theater folk—actors and directors—than audiences, at least on this side of the Atlantic. His plays are read in college courses, particularly French language and...
View Article'Butler'
On 16 May 1861, Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-93) was promoted to major general in the Army of the United States by Pres. Abraham Lincoln. (The Civil War had started in earnest on 16 April when...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1909 to 1920
by Kirk Woodward[Below is the third installment of Kirk Woodward’s series of articles on the theater writings of George Bernard Shaw, based on his reading of all six volumes of the Complete Plays with...
View Article'Oslo'
At a few minutes after noon on a sunny Monday, 13 September 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, Yasser Arafat, reached across President Bill...
View Article'The Merchant of Venice' (Lincoln Center Festival 2016)
On Sunday, 24 July, Diana, my usual theater companion, and I took in our second of three Lincoln Center Festival shows this summer, the evening performance of the Shakespeare’s Globe mounting of The...
View ArticleRe-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1918 to 1933
by Kirk Woodward[This is the fourth in the five-part series of commentary on George Bernard Shaw’s works by Kirk Woodward, based on his reading of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead &...
View Article'Golem' (Lincoln Center Festival, 2016)
According to Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, golem, which is pronounced like (but is otherwise unrelated to) the Lord of the Rings character Gollum, is a Hebrew, not Yiddish, word that means ‘matter...
View ArticleRe-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1934 to 1950
by Kirk Woodward[This is the final installment of Kirk Woodward’s series of commentaries on George Bernard Shaw from his reading of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963)....
View Article'Life Among the Ruins'
[In part 5 of Kirk Woodward’s series “Re-Reading Shaw,” which I posted on ROT on 2 September, he introduces a short piece called “Cymbeline Refinished” from 1937. According to Kirk, Shaw “wrote an...
View ArticleDispatches from Israel 8
by Helen Kaye[On 10 July, Helen Kaye, my friend who reviews for the Jerusalem Post, sent me a collection of some of her recent notices. (I just posted two from last spring on 13 July.) When she asked...
View Article'A Day by the Sea'
My sense about plays that have been forgotten or neglected has always been—and I’ve seldom been proved wrong—that most have been so for an excellent reason: they’re not very good. (I wrote about this...
View Article