Theater | The New York Observer

City Opera Steels Itself

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:07:54 -0400

George Steel has been general manager and artistic director of New York City Opera for exactly nine months now. In that time, he has thrown together an abbreviated but intriguing 2009-2010 season. He has brokered deals with the unions representing almost all of the company’s artistic staff, avoiding crippling strikes. He is on the verge of completing a major renovation of the company’s theater. He has tried to put City Opera’s tumultuous past two...

Oleanna's Kept Her Looks, but Not Her Attitude

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:52:31 -0400

I was a college freshman when the movie of Oleanna opened in late 1994, and already it seemed, to undergraduate eyes, a bit dated.

Oleanna, David Mamet’s tense two-hander about student-professor gender politics and power dynamics, was arriving in theaters only three years after Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court. And it was just two years after Oleanna’s successful stage-play debut Off Broadway. But in those heady early-Clinton years, as...

Iman in Karan, Emmy and Natalie Dis Photogs at Big Ballet Gala

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:20:45 -0400

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but when it’s as gusty as it was on Wednesday, Oct. 7, some kind of warning, or maybe a protective shield, might have helped. But the weather didn’t stop the stars from coming out to the American Ballet Theatre’s fall gala at Avery Fisher Hall, with their typical disregard for outerwear.

Gossip Girl’s Joanna Garcia made her way down the line of...

A Night at the Uproar: George Steel Weathers Coup Attempt!

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:14:34 -0400

It’s been a tumultuous few years at the New York City Opera. It has been continually plagued by financial troubles, and leadership of the organization has been haphazard since Paul Kellogg announced he was planning to leave the position of general and artistic director in 2005. Controversy dogged the short tenure of French impresario Gerard Mortier.

Now, just as the “upstart” opera company (that’s in opera terms; they’ve been around for decades) prepares to mount...

ABT's Three New Works at Avery Fisher

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:36:23 -0400

Because City Center was supposed to be undergoing major revamping (it didn’t happen), ABT switched its fall season to an unlikely venue: Avery Fisher Hall. It has no front curtain, no wings, no rake and no way to hang scenery, and the balcony is a zillion miles from the stage.

The season was also reduced to six performances, no doubt a financial advantage to the company—not only no scenery to commission and build, but...

At the Theater: Millerism, Angst and Ephronland

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:21:57 -0400

Lincoln Center Theater, with its subscription audience of geriatric Jews, is not where you’d expect to find a small, well-crafted domestic drama about a working-class black family. And yet Broke-ology, about two brothers in Kansas City—one poised for big things back East and the other stuck with a dead-end job and a baby on the way—and their dying widower father (played as a lovable lug by The Wire’s Wendell Pierce), is at LCT’s Mitzi...

The Met's Messy Season Limps Into Third Week of 'Boos'

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:46:24 -0400

“Questo giorno di tormenti!” the characters exclaim at the end of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro: “What a day of troubles!”

At this point, Peter Gelb would probably gladly settle for just one day. Instead, his problems, which began opening night, are stretching into the third week of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2009-10 season, the first to be planned entirely by him. There’s booing left and right, the press...

Hamlet Saves Hamlet

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:28:07 -0400

The prince of Denmark may be melancholy, but the star of Hamlet is having the time of his life.

Jude Law headlines the Donmar Warehouse production that played to raves in London this summer, had a quick layover in Elsinore, Denmark—really!—for six performances at Kronberg Castle, and arrived at the Broadhurst last night.

Mr. Law sulks, broods, charms, plots, brays, dances, wrestles, wheedles, fences and, at one point, pelvic-thrusts his way through a brisk three-hour-and-10-minute production....

Falling for Dance Again

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:45:15 -0400

This year, City Center’s tantalizing annual dance smorgasbord (mishmash?) played it safe. It had a respectable theme—celebrating, along with everyone else, the 100th anniversary of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes’ history-changing descent on Paris—and it anchored its five (not its usual six) programs with proven crowd- pleasers. What, for instance, is there left to say about the Trocks’ Go for Barocco, Peter Anastos’ hilarious parody of/tribute to Balanchine’s great Concerto Barocco? Its subtle (and sometimes unsubtle)...

Gloves, Gloss and What They Wore at Nora Ephron's Latest Opening

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:19:41 -0400

The unseasonable chill on the night of Thursday, Oct. 1, posed a sartorial challenge for those attending the premiere of Nora and Delia Ephron’s new play, Love, Loss and What I Wore, based on the book by Ilene Beckerman: a paean to sartorial challenges and the life lessons they inspire. “This was not the first all-black outfit I tried on tonight,” the elder Ephron sister (Nora) told the Transom.

The production, which the...

The Prisoner of Park Avenue! Neil Simon Buys Again in Ritz Tower

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:50:42 -0400

Neil Simon has another apartment to write in. He and his fifth wife, Elaine, have paid $1,225,000 for a two-bedroom apartment at their building, the Ritz Tower on Park Avenue. Broker Jaar-mel Sloane, whose listing says the "exquisite" co-op is in "mint condition," would not comment.

The seller is Gloria Hirtz, who's listed in records as a retiree. "Why should I talk to you about my life there? It was just a plain, prosaic life,"...

Everything Is Happening for Millepied

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:11:16 -0400

Days before President Obama arrived on Martha’s Vineyard this August, Benjamin Millepied was in a house not far from where the president would stay. “What’s that smell?” Mr. Millepied pricked his nose in the air, muttering to himself. “Shit. They were smoking in here, weren’t they?” He was sitting upstairs in a stately white home, a summer residency for dancers, where he and his company were workshopping a ballet to premiere in Europe this...

The Thin Lady Sings

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:11:06 -0400

Danielle de Niese strode through the winding hallways of the Metropolitan Opera House’s basement on a recent morning with a reporter, navigating its warrens as though showing a sibling around a favorite playground.

“It’s like coming home,” she said, to come to the Met. And in fact she was in a sense raised here: She was 18 when she became the youngest singer ever to be accepted into the company’s prestigious program for young...

The Steady Rainmakers

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:37:30 -0400

Considering A Steady Rain, the new drama about two Chicago cops facing excessive precipitation and other forms of dissolution, we must pause first to acknowledge its genius. That is not to say that this, the New York debut of playwright Kevin Huff, which opened last night at the Geral Schoenfeld Theatre, is a brilliant play. But if it were written expressly for contemporary, Hollywood-star Broadway, then it served its purpose brilliantly.

It is a...

Akers Singing Porter Transported Me!

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:26:48 -0400

The new cabaret season is in full swing. A streamlined Jack Jones, still recovering from back surgery and singing the unfailing get-well lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman, accompanied in a rare appearance by the fantastic pianist Mike Renzi, kicked things off at the Algonquin, and it’s good to know he’s lost none of his swing. He’s been replaced by Karen Akers, a polished sophisticate who has every right to be disenchanted with the...

The Guilted Age of Opera

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:50:22 -0400

On a September evening of the late aughts, Karita Mattila was singing in Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

Fifty years from now, the next Edith Wharton, if she could have seen the crowd that gathered to see Ms. Mattila on the evening of Sept. 21, 2009, could easily begin her great novel of New York exactly the way the last one did. So little has changed.

Here’s another lightly adjusted Wharton sentence...

Fall Arts Preview 2009

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:42:35 -0400

The best of autumn's art, classical music, opera, jazz, pop, dance, theater, movies, television and...

Same Score, Different Ballets

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:40:46 -0400

In 1954, Balanchine created a ballet, Opus 34, which he set to Schoenberg’s Accompaniment-Music for a Motion Picture - played twice without interruption. It was actually two completely different ballets, with completely different casts and completely different effects. (The second scene ended with fierce klieg lights turned mercilessly on the audience.) This past week, as part of its Works & Process series, the Guggenheim came up with something similar: two new and different ballets...

Revenge Fantasy Theater

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:31:12 -0400

At some point, and soon, even the most dedicated students of 20th-century Jewish history are going to consider their entertainment options and say, “Enough already with the Holocaust stories.”

In the 60-odd years since V-E Day, we’ve seen War and Remembrance and Shoah, Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List, The Diary of Anne Frank and the insipid Irena’s Vow.

This year’s trend—a new one—has been entertainments in which Jews are seen not as...

It's Time We Met, Peter Gelb

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:16:27 -0400

When the curtain rises on Luc Bondy’s new production of Puccini’s Tosca on Sept. 21, a new era will begin at the Metropolitan Opera. Though Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, was appointed over three years ago, the exigencies of opera scheduling mean that the new season will be the first in which every show is his.

It will be a busy season. There are eight new productions, four of them operas that have...

A Major New Work From Mark Morris

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:26:37 -0400

Empire Garden, one of Mark Morris’ two new pieces just seen at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival but caught by me a few weeks ago at Tanglewood, is the first work of his in all too many years that I’ve come close to loving. It’s ragged, sometimes it’s opaque, but it rises to a big occasion: the glorious Ives trio for violin, cello and viola. And it responds to a big subject: America.

...

Tools of the Trade

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:10:12 -0400

Puppetry of the Penis is an evening at the theater devoted to what its practitioners term “the ancient art of genital origami.” You would more likely call it “two dudes making balloon-animal shapes with their members.”

This entertainment initially arrived in New York in late September of 2001, when destruction was more on our minds than erection. Then starring its two creators, the shaggy Australians Simon Morley and David Friend, Puppetry...

Fear and Trembling in Katonah

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:18:57 -0400

The plot of Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide sounds like it was made up by one of those people who hates opera.

We’re in Babylon, eight centuries B.C. The queen, Semiramide, has killed her husband, as queens were wont to do, with the help of a power-hungry prince, Assur, who now expects to marry her. But she’s in love with an army captain, Arsace, who doesn’t love her and who—spoiler alert!—turns out to be her...

The Ballets Russes at 100

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:19:27 -0400

It was in 1909 that Sergei Diaghilev stunned Paris with the first performances of his Ballets Russes, and today the dance world is celebrating the centenary of this crucial turning point in the history of ballet. Diaghilev—a prodigious musician, authority on art, administrator—inspired not only a great artistic venture but a revolutionary aesthetic. To him, we in the West owe Stravinsky’s Firebird, Petrouchka, Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Apollo; Bakst’s thrillingly exotic palette;...

At Caramoor, A Test For Two Young Opera Singers, And Another for Opera At Large

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:05:08 -0400

The crowd for a recent Saturday evening performance of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore at Caramoor Center for Music and Arts, in lush Katonah, N.Y., was older and whiter even than a typical audience at the Metropolitan Opera (and that is pretty darn old and white).

The opera's star, a young black tenor named Lawrence Brownlee, was singing the role of Nemorino for the first time. "About 10" was the estimate of the number of black people...

All We Are Saying Is Give Pee a Chance: Hair Herd Sings for Civil Liberties

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:17:36 -0400

The cast of Hair is used to getting naked in front of a packed house on a regular basis, but performing at Broadway Stands Up for Freedom, a concert benefiting the youth programs of the New York Civil Liberties Union, at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, like, totally freaked them out. “We were talking backstage about how nervous we were,” said ensemble member Paris Remillard. “We’re used to doing our show every...

A Slick New 'Vanities' Mines Old Jokes, Gender Politics, to Little Effect

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:51:54 -0400

Here’s what I learned at Jack Heifner and David Kirshenbaum’s Vanities, which opened last night at the Second Stage Theatre: People change over time, and good friends can drift apart and cease to be friends.

Here’s the other thing I learned: Your good friends will always be your good friends.

The messages are self-contradictory of course. But, then, this musical—based on Mr. Heifner’s 1976 play of the same title, which ran Off Broadway for more than...

Drama Emanuel! Ari and Rahm's Niece Acts in Middle East Set Piece

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:31:37 -0400

Astute audience members attending the play Peace Warriors by Doron Ben-Atar, which debuted on Friday, July 11, at the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, D.C., may have noticed a familiar last name on the program. The cast features one Natalia Emanuel as Glen Lewis, an adolescent involved in a tussle over Israeli-

Palestinian politics, activism and love that takes place at the home of two married professors.

Ms. Emanuel, a rising sophomore at Yale who, according...

Meet New ABT Phenom, Natalia Osipova

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:18:52 -0400

If ever we needed proof that the gods giveth even as they taketh away, it was to be found at ABT this season, when on successive evenings the company presented in the role of Giselle first Nina Ananiashvili, the greatly admired ballerina on the verge of retirement, then the very young and much heralded Bolshoi ballerina Natalia Osipova.

Ananiashvili has never got by on mere virtuosity. She has an endearing personality, appealing looks and—most important—a...

Anything Goes at Shakespeare in the Park!

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:49:30 -0400

I feel that I must reluctantly correct a serious error Oskar Eustis keeps making about his own theater.

The artistic director of the renowned Public Theater is known for his sometimes manic enthusiasm. He’s like the Music Man leading the parade while singing a rousing rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones”—and no particular harm in that. But in his natural exuberance, he gets things wrong. Among a number of lapses I could mention, by far the...

A Damp Spring for The City Ballet

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:07:38 -0400

It was a disappointing spring at City Ballet. Part of the problem was no one’s fault: Two of the company’s crucial dancers were out for almost the entire time. The absence of Ashley Bouder, the strongest and most brilliant of the younger women, and of the always interesting Sara Mearns meant that the rest of the ballerina contingent was stretched beyond its capacities. Nor could the entire blame be laid to uneven programming—the revival...

The Obama Effect ... Wheee!

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:45:44 -0400

It seems to me that the First Couple—of date-night fame—represent great news for theater lovers. They not only enjoy going to the theater; they do it together.

Were the Bushes ever theatergoers? Or the Clintons? Once in a blue moon, when absolutely necessary. True, Bill Clinton is known to recite entire chunks of Macbeth by heart (“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me …”). I actually saw him...

Should a Fuss Be Made Over Colorblind Casting?

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:00:15 -0400

"I was surprised—shocked, even—by the letter to The Times last Sunday that vigorously protested Phylicia Rashad being cast in the leading role of the white matriarch of August: Osage County. “Let’s keep white actresses playing white roles and blacks playing black roles,” Ronald Fernandez of Pittsburgh concluded sensationally.

His controversial letter raises a number of interesting points (and hackles), and at the risk of offending everyone, I’ll tiptoe with Mr. Fernandez into the minefield.

...

Second Cast Is First Best in New ABT Work

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:55:19 -0400

Like City Ballet two weeks ago, ABT has come forward with a pair of new ballets to activate its spring season. Well, James Kudelka’s Désir is only new to New York: It was made in 1991 and has been performed in Canada, Mexico, Geneva, Stuttgart—in enough places, that is, to have alerted ABT that it’s just as terrible as, say, Kudelka’s Cinderella, which the company took on board a few years ago. But...

Tony S. at the Tonys

Tue, 26 May 2009 15:29:07 -0400

I would like to begin my highly influential tips for the winners of this season’s Tony Awards with heartfelt congratulations to Dolly Parton.

Dolly has been nominated for Best Score of a Musical for the music and lyrics of 9 to 5. She isn’t going to win. I just think Dolly’s amazing.

On a less happy note, it’s arguable that the members of the Tony Award nominating committee should resign en masse....

The Real Billy Elliot

Tue, 19 May 2009 14:19:33 -0400

Jon Peterson: Song Man Dance Man
The Triad, 158 West 72 Street

With youth, one expects energy and exuberance, but good looks, intelligence and talent are rarely found in the same package. Jon Peterson, an enchanting new performer from England who has “adopted” the Apple as his own, has got it all. In Song Man Dance Man, an entertaining nonstop revue at the beautifully refurbished cabaret theater called the Triad, Mr. Peterson is paying...

Where Are the Choreographers? City Ballet Tries and Tries Again

Tue, 19 May 2009 13:52:30 -0400

Again and again, the eternal search for new repertory runs into an unyielding obstacle: the absence of major new choreographers. Peter Martins has had the perspicuity to recognize and bring on board the only two choreographers of real merit to have surfaced in the past decade—Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky—but they both got away: Wheeldon to his own dubious enterprise; Ratmansky to ABT. So what’s an artistic director to do? Keep on fishing.

My Plea to Directors: Quit Screwing With Beckett!

Tue, 12 May 2009 14:21:12 -0400

There is, I believe, a catastrophic error of judgment in Anthony Page’s production of Waiting for Godot, starring Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin.

Samuel Beckett’s seminal Modernist masterpiece—first produced in America in 1956—is famously set in a void with only a near-barren tree (a Beckett tree: one too fragile upon which to hang yourself). But I felt sunk the moment the curtain went up to reveal the stage cluttered with fake rocks and boulders...

Spring for Dance

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:49:12 -0400

May and June are the crazed months of the dance year, with City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre battling it out at Lincoln Center and a bunch of other important/intriguing/threatening events popping up all over town. It’s tough on us poor critics, but great for audiences: Think of December, when you’re basically hostage to Nutcracker and Ailey. (How many times in a month do you really want to see Revelations?) If, on the...

Will New York Fall to The Norman Conquests?

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:25:20 -0400

And so to the burning question: Which one of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy of vintage 1973 English comedies, The Norman Conquests at Circle in the Square theater, must you see?

The first, Table Manners, is my favorite. Not only is it consistently, irresistibly funny; it contains a dinner-party scene so blissfully hilarious that I was on the floor laughing.

All three plays take place during the same absurdly traumatic country-house weekend. They can be...

I’m Tickled by Torture! Durang Deals Serious Comedy

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:31:28 -0400

It's very good news that Christopher Durang, our Poet Laureate of the Absurd, has written a smashing new play.

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them at the Public Theater is a black farce that’s essentially about, well, torture, and a peculiar brand of American paranoia and bigotry—and I haven’t had such fun at the theater since the recent revival of Mr. Durang’s fable about his own dysfunctional childhood, The Marriage...

Two Broadway Blondes Light Up This Cabaret Season

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:59:00 -0400

Kelli O’Hara
CafÉ Carlyle

Talk about irony. Kelli O’Hara and KT Sullivan are two sparkling blondes who are lighting up the cabaret season in the same week—both Irish colleens, and both of them from Oklahoma! This may be something of a first. I know one thing. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a diva on a supper club stage who is six months pregnant. Ms. O’Hara is supposed to be on...

Move Over Lear! New Crazed King in Town

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:33:00 -0400

It's a pleasure to acclaim Geoffrey Rush in Eugène Ionesco’s 1962 absurdist masterpiece Exit the King. Put simply, Mr. Rush is giving one of the greatest virtuoso performances I’ve ever seen.

And, in the best of all possible ways, it’s a daringly old-fashioned performance—the kind we feel exceptionally lucky to witness nowadays. From his first strutting entrance as Ionesco’s 400-year-old King, Mr. Rush is not only in relaxed and riveting command of the stage;...

Marin Mazzie and Jerome Kern Can't Help Singing...

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:32:22 -0400

Opposite You
Feinstein’s at Loews Regency

The dazzling soprano Marin Mazzie, a golden-voiced Broadway showstopper in the revival of Kiss Me Kate and the best Guenevere I’ve ever seen, in Lincoln Center’s Camelot; and Jason Danieley, a winning chameleon who can switch from a bruising baritone to lyrical tenor with the wave of a hand or the thrust of a pelvis (he took it all off in The Full Monty), are joining forces...

New Swoon On Monday

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:13:21 -0400

Daryl Sherman
Algonquin Oak Room

Get rid of Monday. That’s been the lament of hip New Yorkers who for years have searched in vain for something to do on the dullest night of the week. Theaters are dark, cabarets are closed, and there’s no place to go. The Algonquin has a cure for all that. The great Barbara Carroll is already playing classy jazz piano for Sunday brunch. Now Daryl Sherman, one...

Don’t Miss Tom Wopat At the Oak Room!

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:07:24 -0400

Swarthy but cool, like a preppie rodeo cowboy with a tuxedo and a Rolex, Tom Wopat is so charismatic and versatile he can lock in a lyric and lasso an audience at the same time. In addition to starring on Broadway and television, releasing two CDs, and branching out to perform pop songs and Broadway show tunes in massive concert halls and intimate cabarets, he now can swing, too. In fact, his newest CD...

Forever Fonda: Jane Looks Perky as Dying Patient in 33 Variations

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:24:53 -0400

At the risk of seeming ungracious about Jane Fonda, I must confess that I didn’t quite recognize her when she first came briskly onstage at the start of 33 Variations. In her first Broadway role in 46 years, the star, at 71, looks simply marvelous! Not that I expected her to look anything less. But it was almost as if no time had elapsed at all since Klute.

Ms. Fonda,...

The Secret to Paul Taylor’s Staying Power

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:30:30 -0400

How do you explain the extraordinary abundance of Paul Taylor’s art? At 78, he’s still producing dances of the highest caliber—each new piece the distinctive creation of a consummate master.

He (and we) can thank his good genes, his great talent and an uncompromising attitude to his work that has focused his energies in the rarest way. (There’s Balanchine, of course, but who else?) In his 1987 autobiography, Private Domain, he makes it clear: In...

No More 9-to-5! Jane Fonda Returns to Broadway After 46 Years; Dolly’s There to Say Hello!

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:22:58 -0400

“I’m here to see Jane Fonda!” squealed Dolly Parton at the opening night of the new play 33 Variations, starring Ms. Fonda and Colin Hanks, at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Monday, March 9.

Ms. Parton--dressed in a snug sparkly top, with her voluminous blonde hair and heavy pink eye-shadow perfectly in place--was late. At 15 minutes past curtain call, as the lights outside the theater had begun flashing with threatening regularity, Mr. Hanks (son...

Spic ‘n’ Span Son of Tom Hanks Shines Up the Great White Way:

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:41:33 -0500

On a recent cold and sleety Sunday afternoon, an impatient line of sports-coat–wearing men and their fur-clad companions pushed their way into the Eugene O’Neill Theater for a 3 p.m. matinee preview of 33 Variations. Written and directed by Moisés Kaufman, the play—an inventive and meditative look at music, parenthood and obsession spanning 200 years—doesn’t officially open until March 9, but the theater was nevertheless packed. Jane Fonda is the main marquee attraction, and...