Criticultura em Portugal

If you were a talented American director, the Hollywood of the 1980's must have felt adrift. The gritty realism that marked 1970's classics like Taxi Driver , Deliverance , Raging Bull , and Midnight Cowboy  fell prey to more escapist fare that elided with the feel-good Reagan era--epics like Gandhi,  sci fi like Raiders of the Lost Ark, soap operas like Ordinary People  and  Terms of Endearment . All of these were well crafted, but did not exactly challenge one's world view. In 1985 Paul Schrader directed Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters . Based on a the notorious life and 1970 suicide of the famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima, it won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but was never released in Japan. The film was completely unknown to me, and I think it is a fascinating, engaging, neglected masterpiece, well worth seeing on DVD or here on YouTube (if you play it on the computer, try to project on a bigger screen...the cinematography deserves it). Schr...

There have been a number of recent productions in NYC with teen themes and protagonists. Several have been excellent, including The Sensuality Play  and Mercury Fur .   Wilderness , a new play by Seth Bockley and Anne Hamburger produced by En Garde Arts at the Abrons Arts Center in Chinatown, failed to deliver in last night's performance. The evening began awkwardly. It was the evening after the Trump victory, and the theater director came gloomily forward to say that this day was "interesting" and inviting us to a talk back about the play with a clinical psychologist. I wonder if she was more worried about the general mental health of post-election Manhattanites? In any case, we faced a stage with backpacks and assorted basic camping gear scattered about. What followed was a play about troubled teens who are "kidnapped" with the consent of their parents and are taken to the southwestern wilderness to learn basic survival skills and presumably resilience, non-ad...

The Belgian theater/opera director Ivo van Hove is hot right now in the theater world. The director of the innovative Toneelgroep (Theater-Group) Amsterdam, he now directs productions worldwide, tackling both new and iconic plays. In the last couple of years in NYC I saw both his riveting A View from the Bridge  and more jumbled The Crucible  ( see review ). Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music I saw his four hour Kings of War , an intense, provocative, and masterful compression and rewrite of five Shakespeare history plays ( Henry V, Henry VI parts 1-3, and Richard III, with a bit of Henry IV Part 2 thrown in to boot). This is a big year for history plays in NYC that resonate with the current presidential election, and here a Belgian director has, with his outsider's keen eye, provided a great one. The title Kings of War  is a little misleading. While all these kings ruled England during times of war, this adaptation focuses less on battle scenes and strategy t...

Disgraced , the Pulitzer prize-winning play by Ayad Akhtar, has been having quite a run. It is apparently the most-produced play in the US since its 2012 debut in Chicago and New York. I caught up with it in beautifully autumnal Princeton Friday, in a McCarter Theatre Center production shared with the Guthrie in Minneapolis and with the Milwaukee Rep. While I saw and admired the forceful tackling of what is now a worldwide issue (assimilation vs. maintenance of cultural distinctiveness vs. racism), I think the play has structural problems that undercut the message. Disgraced  is essentially a four character play, two couples that come together for a doomed dinner party, a la Albee's  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Like that play, simmering personal and interpersonal issues come to a violent cathartic head at the end of the play. The central character is Amir (portrayed effectively by Mabound Ebrahimzadeh), an American born of Pakistani muslim immigrants, who is part of an e...

On Monday night I saw Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde  at the the Metropolitan Opera. It was perhaps the fourth time I have seen it live, and I have listened to it countless times. Once again the live performance exerted a very unique affect on me, one that I do not experience in other operas or in just listening to it at home on recordings. While this production had its ups and downs, there is something about a live performance of Tristan  that suspends time for me in a most peculiar and intoxicating way. I first experienced this in the 1980's at the San Francisco Opera, when I went into my first live experience at 6 pm, emerged at 11:30, yet experienced it as if about one hour had passed. I wondered then: how does Wagner achieve this time warp? The Met production Monday featured Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton as the ill fated pair. Both sang well, without the overwhelming vocal heft of the great past singers like Flagstad, Melchoir, and Nilsson, but with great sensitiv...