Monthly Archives: May 2015

READING SALMAN RUSHDIE: ‘THE DUNIAZÁT’ · May 30th

(Rushdie’s story appeared in The New Yorker, 6/1.)

In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi, or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/the-duniazat

THEBUS/PLUESS/DEHNERT: ‘SHINING LIVES’ (REVIEW PICK, IL) · May 30th

 

(Hedy Weiss’s article appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, 5/17.)

“Shining Lives: A Musical,” the fervent yet poetic chamber work now receiving an aptly radiant world premiere at Northlight Theatre, is, above all, a story of courage and determination in the face of profound betrayal.

It is a true story — about a group of women who fall in love with their jobs, and the freedom those jobs provide — and about what happens when those women gradually come to realize that the very thing they have loved was, in fact, killing them.

http://entertainment.suntimes.com/stage/northlights-shining-lives-luminescent-new-chamber-musical/

ARTANGEL THEATRE PIECE PUTS MEN’S AGEING IN THE SHOP WINDOW · May 30th

(Mark Brown’s article appeared in the Guardian, 5/29.)

“When you get white hair people patronise you, treat you as if you are a congenital idiot, start calling you we,” rails the 82-year-old actor Dudley Sutton before sipping his Red Bull and making a start on a packet of digestives.

Soon he will be on set for rehearsals which involve him taking his shirt off, removing his dentures, cutting his toenails – all the things we don’t really want to see old men doing. “It is the natural way of life but the modern world would prefer we were all airbrushed and we stayed pleasant to look at,” says director Lu Kemp.

Kemp has been commissioned by the adventurous art group Artangel to create a piece which explores the problems and issues men face when they get old. The result is Have Your Circumstances Changed? a piece named after the officious letter people receive from the TV licensing authorities.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/29/that-old-story-artangel-theatre-mens-ageing-shop-window

NEIL LABUTE: ‘THE WAY WE GET BY’ (REVIEW PICK, NY) · May 30th

 

(Ben Brantley’s article appeared in The New York Times, 5/19; via Pam Green.)

Anyone who’s ever woken up in a strange apartment with an unexpected bedmate and a deathly hangover will appreciate the brute fear that pervades the first moments of “The Way We Get By,” a slight but spirited new play by Neil LaBute, which opened on Tuesday night at Second Stage Theater.

It’s not just the pained walk of that man in his boxer shorts (Thomas Sadoski), lumbering across the stage like a zombie in search of brains, that commands instant pity and terror. So does the what-the-hell-have-I-done expression plastered on his face like a “Wanted” sign, and the subtle, ominous hum (the throb of conscience or merely traffic in the distance?) that underscores every step he takes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/theater/review-the-way-we-get-by-after-a-one-night-stand.html

LOOKING BACK TO THE EARLY STAGES OF ‘FIDDLER ON THE ROOF’ · May 29th

  

(Michael Paulson’s article appeared in The New York Times, 5/28; via Pam Green.)

Sheldon Harnick still remembers that night more than a half-century ago.

He was in Detroit. “Fiddler on the Roof,” starring Zero Mostel, was having its out-of-town tryout. The show was long — ending just before midnight — and had issues.

“During the intermission, I went to the men’s room, and there were two very well-dressed men standing peeing,” Mr. Harnick, the show’s lyricist, recalled in a recent interview. “I heard one say, ‘If I’d known this was about Jews, I wouldn’t have come.’ On the other hand, Joe Stein told us he heard a woman on the phone calling her husband, saying: ‘Harry, I told you you should have come. There’s a pogrom and everything!’ ” 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/theater/looking-back-to-the-early-stages-of-fiddler-on-the-roof.html

GODWIN/BURNETT: ‘THE FLATIRON HEX’ (REVIEW PICK, NY) · May 29th

(Alexis Soloski’s article appeared in The New York Times, 5/18.)

James Godwin’s deliriously weird puppet show, “The Flatiron Hex,” takes place in a New York only a little different from the one we know and sporadically love: “a maze of ghosts and minor gods, floating in the middle of a toxic swamp.” A postmodern assemblage of the eerie and the icky, it follows Wylie Walker, a plumber, I.T. expert and high-level shaman, as he works to protect the city from a catastrophic storm.

At the start of the play, Mr. Godwin enters the Dixon Place stage wearing a mask like a gazelle’s skull and murmuring ominously, an almost cozy entrance compared with what comes after. The plot that unfurls somehow whirls together Mickey Spillane, H. P. Lovecraft, an AppleCare employee manual and occasional gouts of blood.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/theater/review-the-flatiron-hex-a-delirious-tale-with-puppets-and-ickiness.html

DAVID GREIG: ‘BEING NORWEGIAN’ (REVIEW PICK, IE) · May 29th

(Peter Crawley’s article appeared in The Irish Times, 5/26.)

He is nervous and unsettled, living alone in a new flat that grumbles with packing boxes. She is gracious and pretty as a picture. He has beer, whiskey and maybe some gin to offer. She would prefer wine. He is trying to put down roots. She has never felt rooted. So David Greig’s charming and bittersweet play begins, like a teasing will-they/won’t-they comedy, on the difference between the sexes, conducted in more earthly terms: women are from Norway, men are from Scotland.

Although Lisa (Gemma Doorly) and Seán (Karl Shiels) speak with generic Scottish accents in this co-production between Theatre Upstairs, the Cup Theatre Company and Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Lisa claims a more distant connection. Brushing aside Seán’s polite scepticism, Lisa says she comes from Trondheim, “in a place called the Land of the Midnight Sun”. This might explain her dreamy daze. 

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/theatre/theatre-review-being-norwegian-skirts-cliche-to-achieve-poignancy-1.2226746

BEN STILLER HONORED HIS LATE MOM, ANNE MEARA, WITH A TOUCHING TRIBUTE · May 28th

(from Buzzfeed, 5/26; via Pam Green.)

In the wake of Anne Meara’s death, her family — husband Jerry Stiller, son Ben Stiller, and daughter Amy Stiller — released a statement about the beloved actor and comedian.

Over the course of Meara’s 60-year career that earned her four Emmy nominations and a Writers Guild Award, she worked with Ben on Reality Bites, Heavy Weights, Zoolander, and Night at the Museum.

And in the last few days, Ben — who is currently filming Zoolander 2 in Rome — has taken to social media to pay his own tribute to his mother.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/emilyorley/ben-stiller-honored-his-late-mom-anne-meara-with-a-touching#.hmB3lv4dMz

EMMANUEL DARLEY: ‘TUESDAYS AT TESCO’S,’ WITH SIMON CALLOW (REVIEW PICK, NY) · May 28th

  

(Ben Brantley’s article appeared in The New York Times, 5/19; via Pam Green.)

Pauline knows that you’re looking at her. People always do. Her response is to look right back — hard — until you drop or soften your gaze. You better. Pauline is determined to make you feel more embarrassed by the fact of her existence than she is.

In a bold and expert performance that makes no concessions to an actor’s vanity or an audience’s sympathy, the august British actor Simon Callow portrays — no, fully inhabits — Pauline in Emmanuel Darley’s “Tuesdays at Tesco’s.” This bleak portrait of a woman defending her identity, which opened on Tuesday night at 59E59 as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is letting no one off easy.

Continue reading the main story 

SIMON RUSSELL BEALE: ‘THE TEMPLE’ (REVIEW PICK, UK) · May 28th

(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 5/28.)

“In a good play,” said the German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, “everyone is right.” And the fascination of Steve Waters’ play about the impact of the Occupy London movement on the clerical hierarchy of St Paul’s is that it sees all points of view. Intellectually, you feel it is on the side of the anti-capitalist protesters. Emotionally, it shows unusual sympathy for the beleaguered dean, played with exquisite finesse by Simon Russell Beale. Waters’ play is fiction, based on carefully researched fact. It is set very specifically on the morning of October 28, 2011, when the cathedral, after a week’s closure because of the protestors, is about to re-open. The dean is simply anxious to resume worship. But he is beset on all sides by problems. The canon chancellor, sympathetic to the Occupy movement, noisily resigns, the verger feels the building is unready, and the temporising bishop of London still holds out hope of reaching some accord with the protesters. But the big issue is whether the dean should support the City of London in its plan to evict those who’ve set up their tents outside the cathedral.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/28/the-temple-review-simon-russell-beale-donmar-warehouse-st-pauls