One can respect a play and hate it at the same time. Drawn in to the premise completely, you can ultimately feel manipulated, and finally angry. Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is just such a play–capable of awakening the darkest revenge fantasies and then convincing its audience that there…
Parents are difficult in every culture. If they’re kind, loving people who only want the best for their adult children, they can be pretty darn willful about just what that “best” might be. So grown-up offspring have to find ingenious ways of asserting their own independence while still preserving their…
Once your acne starts to clear up, there’s not much reason to see an Allan Moyle movie. Or so it first seems. The Montreal-born director specializes in high-test teenage fantasy, so it’s unlikely that anyone with less than a compelling interest in picking out a prom dress or getting a…
Actress Diane Keaton has declared herself a film director, and she hasn’t taken long to set a style. In Unstrung Heroes, a bittersweet tearjerker combining a twelve-year-old boy, his dying mother, his geeky father and two crackpot uncles, Keaton leans toward solemn silences and worried faces reflected in windowpanes. She…
Wednesday September 13 The rite stuff: We all go through changes–author and journalist Gail Sheehy proved that long ago with her book Passages, which chronicles adult life stages. But it doesn’t take into account that we all experience those changes differently–and at different times. Her latest, New Passages: Mapping Your…
People often talk about art when they’re actually referring to something else. We hear about the art of the deal, the art of medicine. There’s the art of cooking. And the art of politics. Even the art of baseball. Aren’t comedians and rock stars called artists? In fact, it seems…
It’s impossible to beat Alfred Hitchcock at his own game. Nobody could remake Dial “M” for Murder as a movie and make it work. But Frederick Knott’s 1950s crime play still crackles oddly on the stage. And Hunger Artists’ stylish production, though intermittently absurd, translates film-noir technique gracefully to the…
Once in a while a glimpse of something special comes through in a theatrical event. And Voices of the Children: The World of Brundibar is special. This is community theater as it should be: beautifully mounted, intelligent, moving and a little raw around the edges. Because the play is about…
Earlier this year Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds won four major Cesar Awards–France’s version of the Oscars–and the movie has attracted big audiences in that country. But not all French delicacies travel well. The four interwoven coming-of-age stories at the heart of the film are interesting enough because raging teen hormones…
Spike Lee’s in-your-face moviemaking style–the pounding insistence that we get it–is familiar by now. So there’s little surprise when Clockers, which explores the complex, uneasy relationship between cops and bottom-rung drug dealers around a decaying Brooklyn housing project, opens with a grim montage of bloody police crime-scene photos interspersed with…
Wednesday September 6 Ain’t had enough fun: This kind of longevity, for a rock band, is no little feat: True to its name, Little Feat has been mastering chunky, infectious rhythms since the early ’70s, despite the 1979 loss of original guiding light Lowell George, whose stunning slidework and droll…
To many in the art world, painting is the center stage, the place where the aesthetic stakes are the highest. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s thought-provoking exhibition Pure Painting provides snapshot views of current events in the venerable medium. Organizing such a show (this one was put together by…
When you think of Edward Albee, the word “hopeful” does not readily leap to mind. The author of The Zoo Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and All Over, among many other dark dramas, lashes out at human cruelty, egotism and the inability to communicate across gender and class lines…
The great movie and Broadway musicals of the 1930s seem both naive and extravagant in hindsight. Depression-era folk wanted to lose sight of their dreary poverty in visions of glittery gowns and lighthearted romances. The humor in these shows was usually slightly naughty but never really earthy; the brash showgirl…
Apparently, Mr. Selznick’s search for Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on this affair. Robin Williams, James Spader, Stephen Dorff, John Cusack and Robert Sean Leonard were among the throngs answering the casting call for To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. But none of them landed a job. None of…
Just when we thought nothing else could go wrong on this beleaguered planet, environmentalists and medical researchers have unearthed something called “multiple chemical sensitivity.” Ten U.S. government agencies currently acknowledge the existence of this politically correct affliction, which is probably nine more than knew about it an hour and a…
Wednesday August 30 Now and Zen: “I am a synthetic pessimist, not the real thing.” So writes author, traveler and martial arts enthusiast Mark Salzman in his wry, pot-drenched, coming-of-age memoir Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia. Salzman, whose book is written in the droll tradition of autobiographers…
The depiction of the nude figure in the fine arts isn’t just ancient–it’s genuinely age-old. In the Paleolithic cave paintings of France and Spain, usually seen as the oldest works of art on Earth, those famous bison and deer are being pursued by nude men with spears. In the tens…
Sometimes you have to be beastly to be kind. And as beastly as Geniuses, Madmen, and Saints can be, all British playwright Peter Barnes’s rage and wit is directed at what is most vicious and self-deceptive in human beings–particularly those who use religion as a cloak for peculiar vices. The…
You have to love country music–particularly country music from the early 1960s–to really get the most out of Always…Patsy Cline. It also helps if you like being part of the show, since the actors talk and sing directly to you and even draw individuals into the action. But even if…
British director John Boorman’s fondness for exotic locations and quasi-mystical quests give his best films, like the memorable Southern river trip Deliverance, an air of heightened reality, while his botched forays into Arthurian legend (Excalibur) or Amazonian splendor (The Emerald Forest) reveal the boisterous-tourist side of him, along with a…
A wise man–or was it a wise guy?–once cautioned that there are two things you should never watch being made: sausage and movies. (Consider the ingredients.) Nonetheless, directors have convinced themselves from time to time that the moviemaking process itself is suitable material for a movie. Most notable was the…
