Criticultura em Portugal

Hamilton Book, Music, and Lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda The Private Bank Theater, Chicago IL September 7, 2017 Directed by Thomas Kail Starring Miguel Cervantes, Gregory Treco, Ari Afsar, Jonathan Kirkland, and Chris De’Sean Lee It's fair to say that Hamilton is quickly asserting itself as the most important musical of our time. Miranda's revolutionary musical gets people thinking about race, history, and theater in ways they're probably not used to.  -Chris Weller, Business Insider The hip-hop musical Hamilton won multiple Tony Awards in 2016 and has been lauded as a brilliant, transformative, entirely original masterpiece by many theater critics. I finally caught up to it in Chicago, where it has played for the past year. Tickets there are about ½ the $400-700 price on Broadway, and could actually be obtained the week of the show. Despite the palpable excitement and anticipation in the theater, the show failed to deliver a clear point of view, compelling music...

Dear Evan Hansen Book by Steven Levenson Music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul Starring Michael Lee Brown, Garrett Long, Michael Park, Mike Faist August 26, 2017 In my review of last year’s hit film La La Land , I commented on how it looked backwards to the big film musicals of the 1950’s but also conveyed a uniquely millennial sensibility, in which the lovers sing, dance, part, but don’t get back together, since their individual goals trump an old fashioned off-into-the-sunset relationship. The current hit Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen now takes us to some millennials in their formative, angst-ridden teen years. This topic has a long history of portrayal in generationally-specific films (from Rebel without a Cause to The Breakfast Club to Boyhood ), and at least a few musicals, most recently the 2015 Broadway  Spring Awakening , a dark rock musical about tortured adolescence based on a nineteenth century German play.   Dear Evan Hansen plays qui...

1984 by George Orwell Adapted for the stage by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan Starring Tom Sturridge, Olivia Wilde, Reed Birney Hudson Theater, Manhattan August 15, 2017 With our modern arts swamped with apocalyptic and dystopian views of society, it must have seemed like a good idea to produce one of the famed early models, George Orwell’s 1984 . Written in 1949, then novel reflected this committed socialist’s disappointment with Stalin’s totalitarian metamorphosis of socialist principles into a police state, similar to the one that the defeated Hitler had established in Germany. The novel coined phrases that have become near-clichés, frequently referenced or copied by subsequent literature, TV, and movies: Big Brother, Doublespeak, Newspeak. Can this novel’s events still resonate? This adaptation of the novel became notorious for the observed vomiting and fainting of patrons in London and New York since its debut in 2014, at least suggesting one type of impact. The plo...

The Dark Mirror: Schubert’s Die Winterreise Ian Bostridge (tenor); International Contemporary Ensemble, Baldur Brönnimann, conductor August 12, 2017 Rose Theater, Lincoln Center NYC Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey, 1828) is one of the great early romantic works, a song cycle of 24 songs for tenor/baritone and piano describing the gloomy snowy wandering of a scorned lover. He goes through the classic stages of grief, beginning in “Gute Nacht” with “I came here a stranger, As a stranger I depart”. It has always presented an eerily psychoanalytic story a full century before Freud made this sort of introspection common in the arts. Contemporary German composer Hans Zender (1936-) recomposed the piece in 1993 as a “reflection and refraction” on the original, orchestrating it for a small orchestra and pulling/tugging at the original texts and harmonies. This was presented at the NYC Mostly Mozart Festival in a staged production featuring British tenor Ian Bostridge, ...

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams California Shakespeare Festival, Moraga California Directed by Lisa Portes July 29, 2017 The California Shakespeare Theater has been performing summer outdoor theater in an informal setting in the often-chilly East Bay hills since 1974. The company often transcends the normal summer regional theater stereotype with edgy and provocative performances of modern and classical plays. This summer’s performances of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944) would seem unlikely for outdoor theater at first glance. Williams’s plays live in interior psychological spaces, not the great outdoors. Yet this performance, ornamented by bundled spectators, windy gusts, coyote howls, and owl hoots, worked.  This was largely due to a fine cast who avoided outdoor shouting/declaiming, a relatively intimate venue which used a good amplification system, and fine direction by Lisa Portes, a leader in national Latina/Latino directing and faculty member ...