London Theater Review: ‘Hadestown’
Twelve years in the making, “Hadestown” has hit its moment bang on. A show that started life as a touring production for schools, instilling the Orpheus myth into kids through song, became a cult...
View ArticleWest End Review: ‘Summer and Smoke’
It’s hard to imagine “Summer and Smoke“ in better shape. Rebecca Frecknall’s spare staging takes a lesser Tennessee Williams play and reveals the great drama at its core — a devastating fable of...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘The Cane’
“The Cane” lands with a thwack — a timely intervention in a topical debate. By dredging up the specter of corporal punishment in British schools, Mark Ravenhill’s terse allegorical drama asks how we...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘The Tragedy of King Richard the Second’
Political plotting has become a national pastime in Britain. Hardly a week goes by without an attempted parliamentary coup. “The Tragedy of King Richard the Second,” Joe Hill-Gibbins’ stark...
View ArticleWest End Review: ‘Pinter Five and Six’
Every dramatist has their off plays. Stage Shakespeare in full and you’re stuck with “Two Noble Kinsmen.” Tackle Chekhov and your problem is “Platonov.” Director-producer Jamie Lloyd’s charge through...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: Cate Blanchett in ‘When We Have Sufficiently Tortured...
“I’m perfectly capable of making a sandwich,” scolds Cate Blanchett as she inches a sizeable strap-on inside her prostrate husband. It is an unexpected sight, but a stark piece of power play in an...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘Leave to Remain’
“Leave to Remain” was almost a graphic novel. And a concept album. And a television series. Eventually Bloc Party’s frontman Kele Okereke and co-writer Matt Jones swung behind the idea of a stage...
View ArticleWest End Review: ‘Pinter Seven’ Starring Martin Freeman
“Pinter at the Pinter” has been an education — a crash course in Britain’s greatest post-war playwright. Director-producer Jamie Lloyd’s star-studded, six-month sprint through Harold Pinter’s short...
View ArticleWest End Review: Gillian Anderson and Lily James in ‘All About Eve’
To adapt a crass old adage: it’s “All About Eve,” not “All About Steve.” Stripping Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s sharp-witted screenplay about a waning theater star of its period trappings, Ivo van Hove’s...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘The American Clock’
Time is money. Money is time. Both come unstuck in “The American Clock.” Arthur Miller’s kaleidoscopic account of the Great Depression, part autobiography, part social history, crawls through the...
View ArticleWest End Review: Tom Hiddleston in ‘Betrayal’
It takes three to tango, and Jamie Lloyd’s “Betrayal” completely grasps that. Having made it his mission to modernize the way we stage Harold Pinter’s plays, his chic, stripped-down staging starring...
View ArticleWest End Review: ‘Emilia’
We know next to nothing of the “Dark Lady of the Sonnets” — nothing beyond what Shakespeare tells us in 26 stanzas of overblown verse. Her eyes were nothing like the sun, of course – “raven black,” so...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘Grief Is the Thing With Feathers’
There is no road map for mourning. Grief gets us all in the end and, when it does, it comes without guidance notes or instructions. Each grieving process takes its own time, each finds its own form....
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: Maggie Smith in ‘A German Life’
How helpful are warnings from history? Two years ago, in February 2017, Amazon briefly sold out its entire stock of Hannah Arendt’s 500-page treatise, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In it, the...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘Three Sisters’
Ennui has become exhaustion in playwright Cordelia Lynn’s new version of “Three Sisters.” The word recurs and recurs. Everyone on the Prozorov estate is worn out; too “overworked” to do anything but...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘All My Sons’ With Sally Field, Bill Pullman
If “All My Sons” is showing its age, it sure shows no signs of abating. Just days after a major revival opened on Broadway, moving Annette Bening and Tracy Letts into the Tony zone, up the play pops in...
View ArticleWest End Review: ‘Rosmersholm’ With Hayley Atwell
“Rosmersholm” arrives at the end of an era — at least, it does in London. Now playing on the West End, Henrik Ibsen’s dark, dense late play was last seen here back in 2008, as a longstanding left-wing...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘Death of a Salesman’
August Wilson famously disavowed the idea of an all-black “Death of a Salesman.” In 1996, he declared any such staging “an assault on our presence and our difficult but honorable history in America.”...
View ArticleLondon Theater Review: ‘White Pearl’
Playwright Anchuli Felicia King dismantles the Asian market in this misfiring satire at London’s Royal Court Theatre. “White Pearl” makes a case that those seeking to make inroads into the Far East,...
View ArticleWary Theater Rivalry Between London and New York Gives Way to a Boom in...
Give or take a little tectonic shift, the distance between London and New York still stands at 3,465 miles. Arguably, though, the two theater capitals have never been closer. It’s not just the nine...
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