Criticultura em Portugal

Our Lady of 121 st Street Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis Directed by Phylicia Rashad Signature Theatre The Pershing Square Theater, Manhattan June 13, 2018 I have previously enjoyed two plays of Stephen Aldy Guirgis, Jesus Hopped the A Train (2000) and From Riverside to Crazy (2014), both which explore life on the underside of New York from the perspective of its black and Latino populations (Guirgis is Egyptian-Irish, but grew up in mixed race neighborhoods). The latter won the 2015 Pulitzer prize, so Guirgis’ soup of combustible, overt, and repressed ethnic anger seems quite resonant with our times. This revival of Our Lady of 121 st Street (2003) by Signature Theater is more of the same. If in the end it failed to deliver much new profound insight, it continues to show this playwright as a skilled craftsman with a good ear for dark humor, and a finely attuned sense for racial differences and interrelationships in our society. The play has a formula...

Love and Intrigue (Kabale und Liebe) Written by Friedrich Schiller Directed and adapted by Lev Dodin Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg, Russia Brooklyn Academy of Music June 16, 2018 As I was watching this rare US performance of a play by the famed German classicist playwright Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), I kept thinking that I was at an early Verdi opera, just with no music. Perhaps it was the supratitles (the actors were speaking Russian, in an adaptation for the St. Petersburg troupe performing it) or the melodramatic events—lots of court plotting and frustrated love. Then it occurred to me…the Luise in the lead role was in fact also the Luisa of the title role in Verdi’s early opera Luisa Miller (1849). It turns out that Schiller’s plays, rarely performed on stage these days (at least outside Germany), were a favorite of romantic opera composers. His plays were the basis for Rossini’s William Tell (1829), Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda (1835),...

Copp élia (1870) New York City Ballet Music by Léo Delibes Choreography Copp élia by George Balanchine (after Danilova and Petipa) Starring Tiler Peck and Joaquin De Luz Conducted by Andrew Litton Lincoln Center Koch Theater, Manhattan May 26, 2018 Harlequinade (1900) American Ballet Theater Music by Riccardo Drigo Choreography by Marius Petipa (revised by Alexei Ramansky) Conducted by David LaMarche Starring James Whiteside, Isabella Boylston, and Gillian Murphy Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan June 4, 2018 These two comic ballets written near the end of the 19 th century each received well-conceived, sprightly productions by the two big NY ballet companies, each in the midst of their late spring seasons. The effect they made on me was similar. Each provided a useful tonic to the hyper-serious, doomed-female approach to ballet I wrote about in my recent review of Giselle . I mostly smiled (even laughed) throughout each one. And each was enhanc...

Peace for Mary Frances By Lily Thorne Directed by Lila Neugebauer The New Group Pershing Square Signature Center May 27, 2018 Lily Thorne’s gently (and ironically) titled new two-act play is a compelling and harrowing experience. The performance of Lois Smith as the dying, hospice care-committed family matriarch Mary Frances joins Faulkner’s Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying as a memorable fictional dying mother-who-explodes-a-dysfunctional family.  Mary Frances wants to die at home, and the play takes us through events familiar to those of us who have been there with elderly parents. There are attempts at home care by the daughters, ranging from exhausting to abusive, then arrangement of home aids (suspected of crimes), then hospice with trauma over how much morphine to use and whether euthanasia is acceptable or not. There is much clinical terminology…perhaps a bit too much, as it sometimes slows the drama with lecture points about end of life care. The play follo...

A Long Day’s Journey into Night By Eugene O’Neill Directed by Sir Richard Eyre Starring Lesley Manville, Jeremy Irons, and Matthew Beard Brooklyn Academy of Music May 20, 2018 This performance of O’Neill’s last play puts a cap on my one-year Eugene O’Neill marathon, beginning with the early expressionist plays The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones , then the experimental, stream-of-consciousness Strange Interlude , the neoclassically tragedy Mourning Becomes Elektra , and finally his move into realism with The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day’s Journey into Night . What is fascinating about all of these is that none is a great play in a traditional sense. They are all too long, too odd, too discursive, or too unfocused to rise to, say Death of a Salesman ’s level. (Well, maybe Iceman …stay tuned for an update at the end of this review). None is particularly entertaining. But they are all profound explorations of who we are in the world, all are written with poetic, elevate...