Two years ago, the Decemberists' Colin Meloy wrote a song about Myla Goldberg's pretty hands and dangly limbs, but she "must have had a brain lesion or something," because she didn't remember ever meeting him. "I'm bad," she says. "It turns out we t...
Fan-Tan is less a novel (or more precisely, novelization of an unproduced screenplay) than a candygram from the gods of Eccentricity. A collaboration between the late Marlon Brando (once great actor turned barely walking public joke) and the late Don...
Among dubiously impressive kid stunts, British playwright Simon Gray (Butley) may have won out through sheer effort, becoming "a heavy smoker" by age seven. Fifty-nine years later, his friends dying of cancer and emphysema, the three-pack-a-day man f...
This year has already seen a spate of books about the situation in North Koreaincluding Jasper Becker's Rogue Regime, Roland Bleiker's Divided Korea, and Bradley K. Martin's massive Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leaderbut the one you'll ac...
At the start of his first season as artistic director of the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis reflects back on the institution's unique 50 year history and offers some thoughts on how to ensure the theater stays culturally relevant and vital. Fifty ...
That Terrence McNally loves the theater, there's no doubt. Where other playwrights of his generation have let themselves be engulfed by Hollywood's vast maw, churning out screenplays and TV scripts, McNally has largely stayed in the theater, churning...
In many families, matrimony requires a verb of motion: You either marry up or marry down. For two generations of the Soto clan, the loudest and angriest Nuyorican household in town, upward mating has brought nothing but acrimony. Hctor (Eddie Marrer...
What we have here is a failure to communicate. Pretty boy Kevin (Asa Somers), the lead in this rock musical, plays in a wedding combo run by his alcoholic uncle Lane Stephens (a tour de force performance by John Hickok). Skye (Caren Lyn Manuel), Kevi...
All over Lower Manhattan, internationaltourists and local theater buffs have been lining up in the streets to partake of the diverse offerings of the Ninth Annual New York International Fringe Festival. Only a few more days remain to dip into this pr...
Choreographer Jeremy Laverdure took a 20-minute peek at a cool, unearthly realm in All the Faithfully Departed, performed by his "dance enterprise," bsto perfekto. Star-shaped balloons stretched across Here's performance space, their golden gleam ca...
Translated literally, the French entorse means "sprain"; used figuratively, it denotes "infringement." Both pieces given by La Compagnie de l'Entorsethe French David G. Trtiakoff and the Danish Charlotte Schiolertackle transgressive extremes. Both...
What happens when two miserable working stiffs plug into the rockin' soundtrack of their interior lives? In the case of Rock Outan episodic, dialogue-free "play with music" by actor Gregory Jonesyou get an irresistibly cute, surprisingly uplifting ...
It's easy to understand the American public's longtime fascination with the goings-on of courtrooms. Where else can you see confrontations between good and evil, learn the truth about murky matters, achieve perfectly legal revenge, and best of all, w...
"I'm a believer that a book should exist on its own," Bret Easton Ellis says. Which makes sense. Since Less Than Zero, critics have affixed Ellis to the callous, psychotic, bored, privileged males doing bumps in his fiction. He mastered his 1985 deb...
George Balanchine, a Russian born in 1904 who adopted the United States in the 1930s, remade ballet to conform to his ideal of leggy American womanhood. Since his death in 1983, the entire field has seemed a little wobbly. Ballet is an unnatural ac...
Dance always plays a part, more or less, at the American Living Room, Here's annual summer fest. Director Niegel Smith and choreographer Sarah Edgar presented Limbs, based on letters from injured veterans from WW I through Iraq, including a proud yo...
While a few of the works in Contemporary Dance IV (part of the Fourth Annual International Dance Festival) drowned in choreographic clichs, others inspired. Performing in a bright-red dress, Los Angelesbased Maria Gillespie expanded on and subverte...
The most engaging bunch of dancers you can imagine is here on an all too infrequent visit. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is a 22-member crew of personable, versatile performers, accomplished in a mix of ballet, modern, and jazz modes, who are out to p...
No one gets off the hook in Gilbert Sorrentino's writingleast of all writers. In between noirish fantasies, Algerian coming-of-age caricatures, and a sturdy index of poetry, the prolific Brooklyn author has made a regular habit of taking his own kin...
To the fraulein who penned this diary in the spring of 1945, polite language sounded "very prewar." The anonymous author, a professional journalist, describes companionship as intimate but provisional, and etiquette as a relic of the days of peace an...
The Film Society Can't Quite Make the Leap From Past to Present
What happens to a political play that's three decades old? Can it keep its emotional charge, or does it wither when its social relevance fades? You may be asking these… More >>
Blame It on Magritte
You might assume that the Photoshop fantasias of our age would make the visual conundrums of René Magritte's pre-war paintings feel quaint. Certainly the beguiling originality of his fractured figures… More >>
Deceptive Practices: The Glass Menagerie's Poignant Con Game
The theater is a swindle, an exercise in sham. Every play operates on principles of treachery: Flimsy set pieces substitute for solid spaces; people assume names and accents other than… More >>
Not What Happened: A Meditation on Truth and Historical Accuracy
Provocations don't come much gentler than Ain Gordon's Not What Happened, which concluded a brief run at BAM's Next Wave Festival. A meditation on truth and historical accuracy, directed by… More >>
Arguendo Is Full of Supremely Naughty Charm
Who knew Supreme Court justices have such complicated, libidinous inner lives? Anthony Kennedy muses on adults-only car washes. Sandra Day O'Connor contemplates pornographic videos. Antonin Scalia obsesses over nude opera.… More >>
Tragic Lovers Get Teenage Kicks in Romeo and Juliet Revival
The ardor animating the latest Romeo and Juliet seems less the marriage of true minds than the commingling of hot bods. In David Leveaux's revival at Broadway's Richard Rodgers, Orlando… More >>
The Propeller Group Take on the Art World's Celebrity Fixation
"Are celebrities the new art stars?" asked a Newsweek cover story in July. A few months later, certain windy developments (or popcorn farts) that passed for world-shaking events on TMZ… More >>
Q&A: Mario Alberto Zambrano on Taking the Leap From Dancer to Novelist With Lotería
The game Lotería can best be described as a Mexican version of bingo, but instead of numbers, each card bears a striking image, such as beautiful sea goddess La Sirena… More >>
Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Latest Movingly Illustrates a Sexual Awakening
Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times: Episodes 4.5 and 5—at this year’s Crossing the Line Festival—are the newest installments in an epic performance depicting the life story of Kristin… More >>
Anna Nicole: A Cautionary Tale Against Gigantic Breast Implants
What homeless diva recently threatened to commit suicide if her rich patrons didn't cough up $20 million by the end of the year? That's right—the New York City Opera. So… More >>
