Criticals

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Criticals, Theater

Spiderman: Turn on the Lights

March 4, 2011

The theater is schizophrenic, I mused after a recent matinee of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. Only a month before I’d seen Daniel Sullivan’s exemplary revival of The Merchant of Venice—it goes without saying that the shows were as different as night and day, but sometimes such dichotic experience makes us realize the range of…

Books, Criticals, Film, Television

Murdering Myths

January 27, 2011

Choose your Hornet… Superheroes are not clowns. They don’t do pratfalls, lack technological savvy, or otherwise behave like assholes. It took a franchise like Christopher Nolan’s to usher in a new era of the comic-book-hero-made-flesh, and to give guys like us (who lapped up the TV serial-versions) grown-up editions compelling enough to rival, and surpass,…

Criticals, Dance, Film, Theater

Winter Storms on the Great White Way

December 31, 2010

Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine, Winter 2011 2010 ends as the country strives to dig itself out of snowstorms that clobbered both the Eastern and Western regions of our nation. The weather feels an apt metaphor for a multiplicity of woes beyond airport delays and unplowed streets—think, for instance, of the snow job visited…

Criticals, Dance

Swan Lake’s Great Escape

November 11, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Winter 2011 After a bravura Broadway run in 1998, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake returns to New York’s City Center this fall. Amazing how little things have changed since this revisionist take on Petipa’s classic ushered in a new era of dance theater. Then as now, our political times were in…

Criticals, Dance

A Sensual World

October 17, 2010

Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Winter 2011 Watching the late Pina Bausch’s torrential Vollmond made me marvel at the theater’s ability to mirror life. The show, part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, arrived in New York at the end of what could accurately be described as The Week of the Monsoon. …

Criticals, Dance

Under Moneyed Clouds An Artist Unfurls

August 8, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Fall 2010 The gods of Wall Street beamed from halcyon skies during the last performance of Paul-André Fortier’s mesmerizing Solo: 30X30. It was another matter on the ground, as it took more than the charms of an agile Canadian to reach those overachievers who plowed past Fortier’s temporary domain at…

Criticals, Short Cuts

Short Cuts: On Screens Big and Small June 2010

June 15, 2010

I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale (Richard Shepard, Director, HBO). His was one of the great cinema faces of all time. His eyes were key though, registering menace and melancholy, while hinting at unfathomable depths. All was anchored to a towering, unsung talent: in this documentary Cazale’s family, colleagues and fans–some of whom…

Criticals, Dance, Film, Music

Traffic Patterns

April 4, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Summer 2010 In the late Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, the film’s hero, Frederic, rhapsodizes about the city: “I love the city. The suburbs and the provinces depress me. Despite the crush and the noise, I never tire of plunging into the crowd; I love the crowd as I…

Criticals, Dance, Music

In a Mellow Tone

March 11, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Winter 2010 It’s rare that one art form forces you to take the measure of another, but such was the case during the February engagement of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company at the Joyce Theater. It was a question of jazz: Lubovitch presented an evening of pieces set to works…

Criticals, Dance, Technology

Dancing in 3G

February 14, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Spring 2010 It’s the new inevitable. A cellphone rings at the theater/a meeting/a museum/a formal dinner/fill in the inappropriate place. The shattered mood is further scrambled by the offender’s mad dash to silence it, followed by contrite apologies, or the opposite: I’ve witnessed instances where people actually took the call…