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 l...

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 t...

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 postur...

Imagine your first day at college. You wander among unfamiliar buildings, trying to find your classroom. Once found, you calculatingly choose a seat and try to divine who your classmates are from their dress, body language, and verbal/nonverbal behavior. Who is hot? Who seems like one to avoid? All this was my actual experience in arriving at  The Sensuality Play , a remarkable experience presented by The New Group and written by the young playwright Justin Kuritzkes. The structure was daring...6 actors scattered among 7 audience members in a circle of chairs, sans props, conventional stage effects, or costumes, all in a normal classroom at of one of several NYC colleges (I attended at Lehman College in the Bronx, in what appeared to be a dance rehearsal room, bare of furniture except for the chairs). Who around you was an actor, who was in the audience? (only clue--the actors did not have programs) The play began with the remarkable (presence, eyes) Jake Horowitz s...

For non New Yorkers, the Armory is a large performance space in Manhattan, originally used in the 19th C for storing munitions/weapons, now used as a BIG space for arts productions. For example, when I saw  Macbeth  there a couple years ago, an entire gladitorial arena was set up inside, and you entered through foggy moors. In March I saw Die Materie , a 4 act opera/tone poem/? by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Unlike some of the new agey-spiritual spectacles, this one did not come off as one bad LSD trip, at least not always. While there were episodes of un-spiritual stasis, it was an overall fascinating thing to see (see picture of 200 sheep on stage, e.g.) The music was sometimes interesting, occasionally too repetitive without enough forward motion. Movement 1 was about man's technology-- lots of rhythm, pounding chords (exactly 144 to start), Bachian math ratios, symbolic portrayal of the founding of Holland via shipbuilding, zeppelins overhead. Movement ...