The Red Letter Plays: 'Fucking A'
The second play in the Signature Theatre Company’s Red Letter Plays tandem productions was Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A, which began previews under the direction of Jo Bonney (see my reports on By The...
View Article'The Violin'
Caper movies are usually a lot of fun: Ocean’s 11 (the original Rat Pack version, 1960), Topkapi (1964, arguably one of the greatest of the genre), The Thomas Crown Affair (with Steve McQueen, 1968),...
View ArticleDispatches from Israel 12
by Helen Kaye[It’s been over four months since I last shared some of Helen Kaye’s reviews from the Jerusalem Post with readers of Rick On Theater (see “Dispatches from Israel 11,” posted on 17 June)....
View ArticleThe Red Letter Plays, Continued
by Kirk Woodward[As Kirk says below, he and I saw the two Suzan-Lori Parks plays In the Blood and Fucking A in production at the Signature Theatre Company on, respectively, 19 September and 4 October....
View Article'Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train'
Stephen Adly Guirgis has been around as a playwright since 1995 (with the one-act Race, Religion and Politics at HERE in lower Manhattan), so he’s been what’s usually called an “emerging playwright”...
View Article'1789: The French Revolution' (Theatre de la Jeune Lune, 1989)
[In April 1989, I was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to do some research on a 1985 production of the Guthrie Theater. This was part of a multi-city project and it was my practice while I was spending a...
View ArticleFrankie
by Kirk Woodward[I hadn’t expected Kirk to return to Rick On Theater so soon after making such a terrific contribution as “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” (1 November), my friend’s “continuation” of...
View ArticleA Passion For Art: My Parents’ Art Collecting
On Monday, 6 November, an exhibition of the small art collection assembled by my late parents over 40-some-odd years opened at the Stan Kamen Gallery at Washington and Lee University in Lexington,...
View Article'Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib' (2007)
[On 21 November, I posted “A Passion for Art,” an article about my parents’ art collecting. Prominently featured in both the article and the collecting was a painting by Colombian artist Fernando...
View ArticleBob and Ringo
by Kirk Woodward[Following shortly on “Frankie,” his report on a recent Frankie Valli concert appearance (posted on 16 November), my friend Kirk Woodward is back on Rick On Theater with a new post on a...
View Article'Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale'
When I got the brochure for the fall season at 59E59 Theaters over the summer and went over the offerings with Diana, my frequent theater partner, she glommed onto an odd little show called Toys: A...
View Article"Those Guys"
by Bilge Ebiri[Bilge Ebiri’s “Those Guys” is an article(originally published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on3 December 2017) about “character actors” in cinema. Indeed, its on-line version...
View Article'27 Wagons Full of Cotton'&'A Memory of Two Mondays' (1976)
[When I was at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts for my MFA, I took a class in criticism. Our writing assignments included several reviews of productions both on campus and in New...
View ArticleLife upon the Wicked Stage – With a Family
[I frequently try to post informative articles on Rick On Theater about the workings of theater that audiences don’t usually see or hear about. Most often, that turns out to be pieces on some of the...
View ArticleThoughts On Rehearsals
by Kirk Woodward[Having started out this month with a contribution to Rick On Theater by my friend Kirk Woodward (“Bob And Ringo,” about rockers Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr in performance, posted on 1...
View ArticleShakespeare REMIX
[My friend Erin Woodward, who teaches theater in the New York City public schools, has been engaged in an after-school program called Shakespeare REMIX for several years. I’ve seen a couple of the...
View ArticleArt By Indigenous Peoples
[Pursuant to my recent article about my parents’ art collecting (“A Passion for Art,” posted on 21 November), I wrote a little about my father’s connection to the then-private Museum of African Art in...
View Article“The Museum Should Be Open to All"
by Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith[On Thursday, 4 January, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a new admissions policy for out-of-state visitors to the city-subsidized museum. The...
View Article'Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait'
A number of years ago, when I was doing research on Leonardo Shapiro, the avant-garde stage director about whom I’ve written several times on this blog, I looked into one of the artists he named as...
View ArticleTwo Kabuki Reviews (2014)
[As readers of Rick On Theater may know, I’m a big fan of Kabuki, one of the traditional theater forms of Japan. I’ve blogged on it a couple of times in the years I’ve edited this blog: “Kabuki: A...
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