Entries Tagged 'NY Sun' ↓

As a source of firsthand information about American soldiers’ experiences in the Iraq war, “In Conflict,” a documentary theater project now at the Barrow Street Theatre, is irreproachable. Artistically, however, Douglas Wager’s adaptation of Yvonne Latty’s nonfiction book has some problems — primarily a tendency to add histrionic flourishes to material that needs no further amplification. It’s a pity that Mr. Wager, who also directed, couldn’t resist the temptation to stage exaggerated marching…

As a source of firsthand information about American soldiers’ experiences in the Iraq war, “In Conflict,” a documentary theater project now at the Barrow Street Theatre, is irreproachable. Artistically, however, Douglas Wager’s adaptation of Yvonne Latty’s nonfiction book has some problems — primarily a tendency to add histrionic flourishes to material that needs no further amplification. It’s a pity that Mr. Wager, who also directed, couldn’t resist the temptation to stage exaggerated marching…

As a source of firsthand information about American soldiers’ experiences in the Iraq war, “In Conflict,” a documentary theater project now at the Barrow Street Theatre, is irreproachable. Artistically, however, Douglas Wager’s adaptation of Yvonne Latty’s nonfiction book has some problems — primarily a tendency to add histrionic flourishes to material that needs no further amplification. It’s a pity that Mr. Wager, who also directed, couldn’t resist the temptation to stage exaggerated marching…

From Don Quixote to Forrest Gump, one fictional savant after another has carved his way (they’re almost always men) through Western culture, unfettered by the suffocating mores of society as he inspires the surrounding hordes of the “well.” Unsurprisingly, the 1960s and early ’70s were a particularly fertile time for this reductive but nonetheless comforting thesis. The decade bracketed by the 1962 publication of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the 1973 London premiere of…

As a connoisseur of pissing matches large and small, David Mamet must be amused by the offstage drama that surrounds the two dueling Mamet revivals opening on Broadway this fall. Producers of the two shows — “Speed-the-Plow,” which opens October 23, and “American Buffalo,” which opens November 17 — both went after the same theater, the Ethel Barrymore on West 47th Street, after it was made available by the cancellation of “Godspell.” When “American Buffalo” lost out, the New York Post described…

Who says you can’t walk out of a Broadway musical humming the score anymore? My subway ride home from “A Tale of Two Cities” was filled with fond musical memories, as stirring martial songs of revolution jostled for primacy with plaintive laments sung by young lovers torn asunder as the turmoil of 18th-century France boiled over. A subsequent look at my Playbill, alas, confirmed that the songs in my head were all from “Les Miserables.” The memories of “Two Cities,” Jill Santoriello’s pell-mell…

“The Marvelous Wonderettes,” a candy-colored import from Milwaukee, is, in a way, the purest form of jukebox musical: a transparent excuse to hear a hit parade from the 1950s and ’60s performed live. For theatergoers content to bask in girl-group renditions of tunes like “The Shoop Shoop Song” and “Leader of the Pack” for two hours, it will go down easy as a malted milk shake. Otherwise, even the show’s charming cast may not get you through a marathon evening of sugary nostalgia. Roger Bean…

Tony Kushner is the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, a new prize carrying a $200,000 cash gift, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The award, which will be formally presented in a ceremony Wednesday, is the biggest theater prize in the country, and is being issued by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. Mr. Kushner, who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches,” is a two-time Tony Award winner. He has also won Olivier…

The wooden boxes that litter the set of “Beast,” Michael Weller’s muddled picaresque, are both instantly familiar and jarringly unusual. Long and wide enough to comfortably house bulked-up young men and women, they are draped in the stars and stripes of the American flag, with unobtrusive handles that make it easier to hoist them on and off airplanes and into the ground. They are military coffins, the seemingly inevitable reminders of the war dead. Current American policy has relegated them so…

Do you prefer your singing underdogs prepubescent and British or flatulent and green? Either way, the fall season should have something for you. “Billy Elliot” (opening November 13) garnered ecstatic reviews in London in 2005; Elton John has by many accounts contributed his strongest theater score yet, and three young charmers share the title role of a plucky 11-year-old dancer from strike-ravaged Northern England. “Shrek” (December 14), meanwhile, features an odd hodgepodge of critics’…