“And yet we have been here. And yet we remain. We remain in the genes of our children, everything we build and destroy, the people we touch, songs we sing, the stories we tell and leave behind. We echo into the ages and that has to be enough because it’s all we have.” – Narrator In the Boy’s “first ever…
“The thing was, I was really good at it. And I loved it. I just loved being able to . . . I don’t know . . . make someone more comfortable. Make some of their pain go away. And it wasn’t just because it was someone I loved. It was . . . the fact that I was in…
Following the inauguration of the forty-fifth President of the United States, not a day goes by without listening to Members of Congress – from both sides of the aisle – airing their points of view on all things Trump on national television. Among the chorus of regional dialects is the unmistakable Southern drawl with a twang that seems able to…
“Ain’t a man’s talkin’ big what makes him big-long as he makes folks believe it? [Sure], I talks large when I ain’t got nothin’ to back it up, but I ain’t talkin’ wild just [the] same. I knows I kin fool ’em—I knows it—and [that’s] backin’ enough [for] my game.” – Brutus Jones It is not easy to watch Eugene…
The 2017 Broadway revival of “Miss Saigon” raises rich and deep enduring questions. Based on Giacomo Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” the mammoth musical has enjoyed decades of success – as has Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s “Les Miserables.” Success aside, the questions remain: What is the “ultimate sacrifice” one human being can make for another? What are the moral parameters involved…
“The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams’ 1944 memory play, seems to have just left our stage … or is that my own memory playing games? In fact, Cherry Jones took on the iconic role of Amanda Wingfield – and was nominated for the Tony – in 2014. Three years prior, Judith Ivey delivered a lovely and highly praised performance in a…
“Sweat,” currently running on Broadway at Studio 54, seems to be a play about not what it is assumed to be about. It is not about post-election politics. It is not about the history of factory closings in America’s rust belt or the pandemic of brokenness in American cities. “Sweat” is about human brokenness, the kind of brokenness that results…
“Picnic and Come Back, Little Sheba: William Inge in Repertory” at Transport Group Theatre Company at the Gym at Judson leaves one longing for more William Inge and more Transport Group – perhaps a trifecta that includes the 1955 “Bus Stop.” Inge’s themes of deep angst, “small ambition,” the search for identity and purpose, lost (or abandoned) youth, choices and…
“Forty years ago this place was a fabulously tacky gay bar with a life-sized cardboard cutout of nude Burt Reynolds hanging from the ceiling. It was a church. There was live music and dancing, hustlers, drag queens, even a mother who came with her son. It was a community of people who were funny, and brave, and full of life.”…
When one visits an art museum and stands in front of a painting – let us say Jeff Koons’s “Woman in Tub” – one reacts in one of perhaps three ways: the visitor “likes, just likes it” and snaps a digital image and moves on to another contemporary artist; the visitor pauses for some time and examines the work, deciding…