Criticultura em Portugal

The Irishman Written and directed by Martin Scorcese Starring Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci The Underlying Chris Written by Will Eno Directed by Kenny Leon Second Stage Theater, Manhattan December 5, 2019 63 Up Directed by Michael Apted   New Year’s 2020 (and, BTW, Happy New Year! to my readers) is a good time to think about aging. Boyhood , the famed 2015 movie that followed the evolution of a dysfunctional family, all filmed by director Richard Linklater over 12 years with the same actors, was at heart a creative attempt to show aging. It was fascinating to watch the young actor Ellar Coltrane (age 6 at the start) grow and evolve, not to mention grownups Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, over the span of the film. While the storyline itself was basic and not particularly memorable (the parents divorce, the kid manages), the unprecedented technique of filming a movie over a such a span was a fascinating special effect. The director accomplished t

One in Two Written by Donja R. Love Directed by Stevie Walker-Webb The New Group Pershing Square Theaters December 18, 2019 Donja R. Love (below) is a millennial-generation Afro-Queer (his term) playwright with credentials from Julliard, among other places. One in Two is his new autobiographically-flavored protest to the unresolving AIDS epidemic in the queer black male community. It is estimated that 1 in 2 (hence the name of the play) queer black men are HIV+, rates far higher than, say, the Latino or white community. The reasons for this are complex, including cultural factors of shame and avoidance within both the queer and black communities, as well as lack of interest from medical organizations and complete neglect by the media. Since AIDS became, for at least white patients, a manageable disease live with, rather than die from, it has largely disappeared from most public discussion. But this is because many patients have access to a variety of antiviral drugs fo

The Sound Inside Written by Adam Rapp Directed by David Cromer Starring Mary Louise Parker and Will Hochman Studio 54 Manhattan December 12, 2019 Adam Rapp (b. 1958) is an American playwright and novelist best known for a small collection of intimate interpersonal dramas and novels (young adult, graphic, and adult). The Sound Inside , an intense, beautiful two-character play from 2018, shows a keen sense of plotting, nuanced dialogue, and using speech to reveal unconscious or repressed feelings of the actors. While on the surface this production was a star vehicle for Mary Louise Parker ( The West Wing, Weeds, Grand Canyon, Fried Green Tomatoes ), it is one of those rare plays that transcends the actors and stage technique to immerse you in a gripping personal drama, a sort of emotional cocoon from which you emerge 90 minutes later on the streets, a bit disoriented. The play centers on Bella, a writing professor at Yale. She is moderately satisfied with her caree

Lear Music by Aribert Riemann Libretto by Claus Henneberg (after Shakespeare) Conducted by Fabio Luisi Directed by Calixto Bieito Starring Bo Skovhus Palais Garnier Op é ra Nationale de Paris November 24, 2019 I first saw Lear by German composer Aribert Rieman (b. 1936) at the San Francisco Opera back in the early 1980s, not long after its world premiere in 1978. I was fairly new to opera then, but was impressed by its drama and colorful modernist score. Since then, I have become much more experienced in both twentieth century opera and in Shakespeare’s King Lear , which I’ve see twice during the last year, neither in a quality production. King Lear has proved amenable to adaptation, most famously by Japanese director Akiro Kurosawa's film  Ran , where the drama is memorably transported to feudal Japan in a movie that is on my top 10 list. Rieman’s operatic adaptation, revived by the Paris Opera the past few years, was even more memorable this time around, a

History of Violence Written by É douard Louis Directed by Thomas Ostermeier Starring Laurenz Laufenberg schaub ü hne berlin St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn NY November 14, 2019 This excellent, jarring play was adapted from a memoir/novel by French author É douard Louis in 2016 by Thomas Ostermeier, the author and company director of the modernist German company schaub ü hne berlin. It made for quite a multinational evening…a French book portrayed in German by a multinational cast, done in a Brooklyn theater. The German text was translated with supertitles on a screen behind the actors which, common to many modern plays, served a major role in the production via many handheld camera projections. The play was an excellent commentary on both modern sexuality (not really so modern as it turns out) and class/racism in Western countries, and did so with a visceral, immediate fusion that made me reflect more than most such plays with political points to make. The memoir/novel

Cyrano Written and Directed by Erica Schmidt Lyrics by Matt Berninger Music by Aaron and Bryce Dessner Starring Peter Dinklage and Jasmine Cephas Jones The New Group Daryl Roth Theater, Manhattan November 2, 2019 Cyrano de Bergerac , Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play about the guy with a heart of gold and a too-big nose, has timeless popularity, and has been reframed as a musical or opera several times. This is logical, given its heart-on-sleeve romanticism and timeless theme of frustrated love. The plot of the beauty (the lovely Roxanne) who initially falls for a handsome hunk but later realizes that the physically challenged, but devoted and brilliant Cyrano is the real catch, appeals to the emotions of a broad public. So it’s not surprising that the New Group has devoted all of its fall schedule, in a larger-than-normal theater, to this new musical treatment of the story, featuring Game of Thrones ’ Peter Dinklage, and adapted and directed by his wife Erica Schmidt. It i

Turandot Composed by Giacomo Puccini (completed by Franco Alfano) Libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni Conducted by Marco Armiliato Production by Franco Zeffirelli Does the Metropolitan Opera have a future? A ridiculous question, seemingly—it’s only the world’s most prestigious house, and the place where opera careers are defined. Yet seeing the overstuffed, overwrought Turandot in a section where ¼ of the seats were empty made me wonder. The company must do better than this if it is to remain relevant to modern audiences who seek challenge and provocation at live performance, not just comfort. This production failed to do this. Turandot is an uncompleted opera by the postromantic master Puccini. His best works ( Madama Butterfly, Tosca, La Fanciulla del West , and (perhaps) La Boheme ) made him an icon across the globe in the early part of the twentieth century. So when he died prior to completing his last grand opera, the opera world was left with a dilemma

Macbeth Written by William Shakespeare Directed by John Doyle Starring Corey Stoll and Nadia Bowers Classic Stage Company, Manhattan October 30, 2019 Parasite Written and Directed by Bong Joon-ho Wow, that was a brisk Macbeth ! The play is already a concise one by Shakespeare’s standards with fewer side-plots and subsidiary characters to dilute the playwright’s focus on the sociopathy of Macbeth and his wife, and how they murder the king and violently die. But this bracing version by John Doyle came in at 100 minutes in a single intense act, a short-duration record in my experience. Doyle is known for his creative, scaled-down Broadway revivals of works like Sweeney Todd and Company (where the actors also played orchestral instruments). He brought his principles of conciseness to bear here. There was a minimalist black set with a single Tudor-style balcony. There were minimal cuts to the text, but things were mostly kept moving by the absence of scene changes,

Heroes of the Fourth Turning Written by Will Arbery Directed by Danya Taymor Playwrights Horizon, Manhattan October 26, 2019 Millenial playwright Will Arbery is from Texas, specifically conservative Texas. He’s written a new play Heroes of the Fourth Turning about young conservative Catholics wrestling with their faith in a disturbingly liberal world. This is a world Arbery knows well. His father is currently the president of Wyoming Catholic College, a small conservative place that features a mixture of Outward Bound-style wilderness training and a traditional Western Great Books curriculum. The playwright now lives in New York, and this new play is alternately sympathetic and critical of conservative religious (and political) viewpoints. Yet it has been praised by a variety of conservative commentators, somewhat to the surprise of the playwright. This reminds me of the response to The Book of Mormon, which can be viewed by different audiences as either ribald critique or warm reflect

Linda Vista Written by Tracy Letts Directed by Dexter Bullard Starring Ian Barford Hayes Theater, Manhattan October 24, 2019 Tracy Letts (b. 1965), famous as an actor and for writing the superb August, Osage County (2007), composes plays about dysfunctional people. His terrifying women tend to dominate their torn, dysfunctional men. Linda Vista (2017) has come to Broadway after being written for the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, then migrating to LA. It features a virtuosic role for a male actor, both showing the pathetic frailties of male midlife crisis as well as providing a sounding board for Letts’ frustrations with modern culture. For me, it succeeded moderately, but failed to cohere as a great play. Middle-aged men have certainly evolved in the literature of the last century. Prior to 1900, playwrights were not so interested in them; Macbeth and Hamlet are young men, while Lear is aged. Ibsen mostly wrote great female leads. Shaw liked men, but more as

Caesar and Cleopatra Written by George Bernard Shaw Directed by David Staller Starring   Brenda Braxton, Robert Cuccioli and Teresa Avia Lim Gingold Theater Group Theater Row, Manhattan October 8, 2019 Caesar and Cleopatra , written in 1898 by British playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), is a strange duck. It feels like a prelude to his more famous Pygmalion (the My Fair Lady inspiration) from fifteen years later. This one feels like it will plumb familiar Shakespearean ground, with Caesar arriving in Egypt to supervise his unruly territory and meeting the teenaged Cleopatra. The unusual spin is that it becomes a play about mentorship, rather like Pygmalion , in which an older man helps a girl/young woman mature and “flower”. The play would have been a hot topic in 1898 as Great Britten wrestled with the financial and moral consequences of imperialistic empire building. But Shaw does not really show much interest in such moral quandaries, other than describin

Betrayal Written by Harold Pinter Directed by Jamie Lloyd Starring Charlie Cox, Zawe Ashton, and Tim Hiddleston Bernard Jacobs Theater, Manhattan September 18, 2019 Seeing the bracing Betrayal (1978) reminded me of how much we have lost with the death of Harold Pinter (1930-2008). The edgy emotional subtleties and carefully nuanced dialogue among the three characters, each of whom has betrayed at least one of the others sexually or otherwise, is a very different style of theater that what I generally see on Broadway and in London these days. The best, or at least most notable contemporary plays, regardless of the size of the cast, aim for big topics—politics, prejudice, social reform. Their style is more overt, the emotional range wide, more like a Mahler symphony than a Bach fugue. Examples include the big, rowdy The Ferryman (2017), the emotionally overt August, Osage County (2007), and the multilayered, politically and racially provocative Fairview (2018).   Pint

Franz Liszt: Poetic and Religious Harmonies, S. 173 Performed by Adam Tendler and Jenny Lind Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn September 24, 2019 The music of Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is justly critiqued for being all flash, little substance. After all, he was among the first of what we would now call “rock stars”, touring Europe as a young man and inducing women to swoon, with his wild hair, fierce demeanor, and virtuosic swooping and pounding on the grand piano, then still a rather new, sexy instrument. The recent “Death of Classical” series concert in the catacombs of the historic Brooklyn Green-Wood Cemetery showed a different, more innovative and reflective side of the composer. He composed three sets of pieces called Poetic and Religious Harmonies”. The 10-piece set performed in Brooklyn was written in 1847 while he was shacked up in Poland with his mistress, the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgensein. She was a married noblewoman who swooned at one of Liszt’s concerts and