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...