Criticultura em Portugal

I am innately suspicious of star vehicles. I seem less wired to admire someone for who they are/have been for what they can now do. ENTPs are like that sometimes. Overall, I usually evaluate the theater, opera, etc. more for the overall quality of the play and production than for the individual performance, with some exceptions (seeing imperfect versions of Birgit Nilsson at 60 or Vladimir Horowitz  at 80, e. g.). So I have little patience for opera and ballet queens who discuss the performers rather than the performance.  That said, I enjoyed seeing Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams flog one another at Blackbird , the intense and excellent two character play by David Harrower. Seeing it the day after a well-reviewed but mostly tedious  The Crucible , I admired the play's taut construction. It gets to its point quickly and ratchets up the tension with a constant forward motion mostly absent in the Arthur Miller play, which seemed glacially long by comparison.  Its a sim

Some famous art is really good. Some you may want to actually travel long distances for (Machu Picchu, Carravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter, Parsifal  at Bayreuth).  Then there is Arthur Miller's  The Crucible . It fits into the class of iconic things you read or studied as a kid in the USA, perhaps because it is thought to be an intersection of cultural and historical competency (see also:  Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, The Scarlet Letter ). Similar to my recent experience re-reading  The Great Gatsby, seeing  The Crucible  last week reminded me that fame does not always equal quality. Despite a much-lauded director and production, the play for me seemed mediocre placed next to similar mid 20th century icons like  Streetcar, Long Day's Journey,  or even Miller's earlier  A View from the Bridge , whose emotional excesses were stripped raw by Belgian director Ivo van Hove last year on Broadway to exhilarating effect. I had hoped his mini

There was considerable buzz in town over White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, written by Nassim Soleimanpour, a young Iranian playwright who was unable to travel out of Iran at the time he wrote the play.  The marketable gimmick is that the sole (famous) actor receives the script onstage immediately before the play begins, without (in theory) any prior preparation or word of what will happen. The "play" has been presented around the world in multiple languages, as at Edinburgh fringe. In this Manhattan run it plays each Monday night with a different actor or actress, and the roster is impressive, e.g. Nathan Lane, Gabriel Byrne, Martin Short, Whoopi Goldberg. The actor the night I went was Shohreh Aghdashloo, of film and TV fame. Why would she do this? She suggested that the challenge and concept were irresistible, and I suspect competitive ego enters the picture, too.  The experience, while innovative, was sophomoric. There was much metaphysical posturing about the playwright'