“Notre Dame de Paris” is based on the novel by Victor Hugo and is adapted by author Luc Plamondon with music composed by Richard Cocciante. The musical and dance piece is billed as a musical spectacle and this current production at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater lives up to that righteous claim. Containing fifty-one musical numbers and little spoken…
In the “Camelot” now on the stage of The Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, magic has been replaced with science, wizardry replaced by wisdom, romance replaced by practicality, and fantasy is overcome by reality. This all falls at the hands of Aaron Sorkin who penned this new book based on the original by Alan Jay Lerner, in an attempt…
In an email with several attachments (none of which any of the invitees bothered to read), Morkan (the incomparable Marylouise Burke) invites several friends to her “very big house, on the banks of a large river, just north of a big city” to celebrate Epiphany and meet the honored guest, Gabriel. This is the setting for one of the most…
After an economic downturn and the subsequent gentrification closes the mining industry in 2017 Clements, Idaho, the residents vote to unincorporate as a town. But mining continues to flourish in Samuel D. Hunter’s “Greater Clements” currently running at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater: not the mining of “silver, lead, zinc, copper, little bit of gold, some molybdenum,” but…
“The Great Society,” the second installment of playwright Robert Schenkkan’s biographical account of the years Lyndon B. Johnson spent as president in the White House, is less a drama and more a chronological list of the destructive events the plagued his second term in office. To the playwright’s credit, it is extensively detailed and factual; however, to his discredit, it…
In the 18th and 19th centuries, new phrases entered the language of the sailors who took to the sea off the island of Nantucket, one of the whaling capitals of the world during that period. One specific expression “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” describes what happens when a harpooned whale drags the sailors in their long boat across the surface of the…
There is something magnificent happening at Lincoln Center Theater, and it has to do with a powerful and intriguing woman, who has currently walked onto the stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, revealing that Eliza Doolittle has arrived in the twenty-first century, branding “My Fair Lady” as an old musical destined for a new era. The phenomenal revival directed by…
When a speaker raises alternate views of a significant problem and seems at one point to take “one side” and then “the other side,” and then advocates for the purity of moral ambiguity – presenting profound rhetorical arguments for each of those points of view – the audience is left bombarded by what seems like conflicting ethos, pathos, and logos…
The highly anticipated new play by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Ayad Akhtar entitled “JUNK” – referring to the bonds sold in the 1980s by Machiavellian inside traders – does tend to sacrifice intrigue for the sake of entertainment. The plot centers around the fictional junk bond king Robert Merkin (played with unscrupulous charisma by Steven Pasquale), as he manipulates his…