cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
Designing Man (Daniel Morgan Shelley) wields his sculpting tool at the request of Plentiful Bliss (Tracy Jack) in "The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller"
My review of Jeff Cohen’s intriguing play The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller, smartly staged by Alfred Preisser, has just been posted on CultureVulture.net. Check it out here and let me know what you think.
My review of Gogol’s THE DIARY OF A MADMAN at the BAM Harvey Theater, starring Geoffrey Rush (above), has just been posted on CultureVulture.net. Check it out and let me know what you think.
It seems absolutely fitting that the last show to go into production at La Mama ETC before that Off-Off-Broadway landmark theater’s legendary founder Ellen Stewart died January 13 was a collaboration between two generations of experimental theater artists — the young writer-singer-songwriter-director-drag-artiste Taylor Mac (above center, with James Tigger! Ferguson and Will Badgett) and the Talking Band, an ensemble that has been creating and performing its own work since 1974. My review of The Walk Across America for Mother Earth has just been posted on CultureVulture.net.
“The play tells the apparently pretty much true story of Taylor Mac’s involvement in an actual 1992 grass-roots march from Pennsylvania to Nevada by activists demanding that the government return to the Shoshone people land that it had appropriated as a nuclear testing ground. But it’s no kind of earnest documentary. The show combines ramshackle vaudeville, a Mickey-and-Judy version of commedia dell’arte (on LSD), and a real play that channels Chekhov and The Wizard of Oz.”
You can read the entire review online here.
My review of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities at Lincoln Center Theater has been published on CultureVulture.net. I met Robbie Baitz when he was very young, 24 or 25, and had just had his first taste of success in Los Angeles with Mislansky/Zilinsky. I’ve been watching his plays ever since.
“It’s not that Baitz has never succumbed to the occasional cliché or authorial contrivance, but he has impressed me with the consistent excellence of his work more than almost any other American playwright, certainly of his generation. In plays like A Fair Country, Mislansky/Zilinsky or ‘Schmucks,’ and The Paris Letter, Baitz zeroes in on corruption and moral rot as it shows up in various corners of business—publishing, academia, high finance, Hollywood, the art world. He’s probably best-known now as the creator of the hit TV series “Brothers and Sisters,” which exposed a wider audience to his gift for dramatizing intricate family dynamics in sophisticated dialogue. Those same talents shine especially bright in his latest play at Lincoln Center Theater, Other Desert Cities.”
You can read the complete review online here.
After Ben Brantley’s rave review in the NY Times, the play’s run is completely sold out. At the show, I sat next to Ken Fallin, who does theater illustrations for the Wall Street Journal and other publications. He mentioned that Other Desert Cities is supposed to move to Broadway in the fall.
My review of John Gabriel Borkman has just been posted on CultureVulture.net. The production launches the spring season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and stars Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, and Lindsay Duncan.
“John Gabriel Borkman is one of those plays by a great author that one hears about but rarely sees. Perhaps that’s precisely why James Macdonald rose to the challenge of staging it. Macdonald, who has directed fine productions of difficult works by Sarah Kane (4:46 Psychosis) and Caryl Churchill (A Number), among many others, first mounted the Ibsen play last year at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The cast he assembled there and brought over to New York could scarcely be bettered.”
You can read the entire review online here. What I didn’t mention in the review is that two-thirds of the way through act one, during an intense scene between Alan Rickman in the title role and Lindsay Duncan as his former lover and sister-in-law, a man in the second row fainted. Stage managers and volunteer physicians started swarming around him until Rickman finally said, “We need to stop. Someone is ill,” and ushered Duncan offstage. The lights came up, and once the man was revived, his entire party left the theater. When the play resumed, Rickman launched back into the scene full-throttle — very impressive handling of an actor’s nightmare.
another eye opens 