Criticultura em Portugal

Farinelli and the King Written by Claire van Kampen Starring Mark Rylance, Iestyn Davis, and Sam Crane Belasco Theater, Manhattan December 24, 2017 After seeing so much small-scale off-Broadway theater lately, the opulence of Farinelli and the King hit me with a jolt. The antique Belasco theater (a notorious knee-crusher, built for the patrons of 1907), was resplendent, with its opulent architecture and old-fashioned separate opera boxes cleverly modified; on-stage opera boxes were designed surrounding the performing area, creating a continuous opera box architecture that extended from the audience around the stage itself, creating sort of an immersion in an 18 th century opera house. The theater was artfully draped in rich velvet to hide the art-nouveau décor (inappropriate to 1740), yet maintained its splendor. A small baroque orchestra was upstage, in the balcony behind the actors, dressed in appropriate 1700s attire as well. The lavish onstage décor included Fragonar...

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Daniele Gatti, conductor Carnegie Hall, Manhattan January 17, 2018 Richard Wagner: Prelude to Act 3 and Good Friday Spell from Parsifal (1882) Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 in D minor (1896) Wednesday’s excellent concert by the peerless Amsterdam Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra paired the final music composed by two of the giants of Romanticism, Wagner and Brucker. Bruckner idolized the 10 years older Wagner, and the unfinished Ninth Symphony contains several explicit references to Wagner’s music, most obviously the ascending string figures in the Adagio that evoke the Grail Motive from Parsifal.  So this concert pairing was logical and interesting. It was particularly fun for me, since I saw this same conductor perform Parsifal complete in memorable performances at the Bayreuth Festival (2010)  and at the Metropolitan Opera (2013). Gatti works well with these big virtuosic orchestras, always maintaining forward motion and ...

The Children Written by Lucy Kirkwood Directed by James Macdonald Starring Francesca Annis, Deborah Findlay, Ron Cook Manhattan Theater Club Samuel J. Friedman Theater December 24, 2017 Apocalyptic literature falls into several categories. Most dramatic are those that portray exaggerated, hyper-violent or hyper-chaotic human responses as in  Lord of the Flies. Such efforts include the recent plays  Mercury Fur and A Clockwork Orange . Others show normal, often overwhelmed people placed in a violent or intolerable landscape: the recent play Arlington , Cormac McCarthy's novel  The Road, the moving 1983 film Testament, and    Orwell's 1984   are examples.   The Children , a new play by British author Lucy Kirkwood, is an example of a third genre, apocalypse hinted at darkly but not directly shown, relying on the viewer's imagination. Other recent examples of this genre include Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone-- three ladies hint...

The Pirates of Penzance Performed by The Hypocrites Adapted and Directed by Sean Graney NYU Skirball Center December 8, 2017 Chicago’s acting company The Hypocrites began in 1997 as a neighborhood “storefront” group, but has grown in budget and reputation, having now performed coast to coast, including at the Berkeley and American Repertories and the Goodman Theater. They specialize in brisk reworkings of standard plays, including All our Tragic , which combines 32(!) Greek tragedies in one evening, Our Town , and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Their take on The Pirates of Penzance came to New York this week after appearing in past years in Berkeley and Chicago. G&S is a tricky thing to do. On the one hand the topical Victorian political humor is always ripe for updating; yet the very distinctive Offenbach-derived musical style and witty lyrics, and timeless themes of class prejudice and snobbery warrant some preservation. This production pushes pretty far away from ...

Office Hour Written by Julia Cho Directed by Neel Keller Starring Sue Jean Kim, Ki Hong Lee New York Public Theater December 3, 2017   Office Hour was the second of two plays at NY Public Theater that I saw on a recent Sunday, each written by an American playwright associated with “ethnic” themes, and each feeling like it occurred far from Manhattan. Cho, the 42-year-old daughter of Korean immigrants, has created several plays for southern California theaters, and has a gift for creating memorable characters and for dialogue that communicates the conflicting emotions and pressures of the immigrant experience. On the east coast depictions of Asian issues are much less common than of black or Latino themes, so this play was very welcome. It is essentially a two-person play, ninety minutes long, but the “office hour” depicted is a tense session between a troubled, enigmatic young Korean student and his well-intentioned college writing professor, also Korean. Other teach...