Criticultura em Portugal

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