DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ ‘Terce’ Review: How the Other Half Prays, in a Reimagined Mass
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-19 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When I’ve had the opportunity, as a wandering Jew, to visit the houses of worship of friends, I’ve never felt much in danger of conversion. “Terce,” produced by Here as the centerpiece of this year’s Prototype festival, advances three hours to midmorning. (The title derives from the Latin for “third.”) By then, a congregation would presumably be awake enough to absorb its sunlit richness. That richness does not depend on the usual elements of plays or prayer: characters and narratives, pipe organs and priests. “Terce” is not theater except to the extent that religious ritual, being a parent of theater, bears a family resemblance.

Persons: I’ve, That’s, Heather Christian, I’m, “, ” Locations: ”, Irondale, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Jesse Green’s Best Theater | Unforgettable ExperiencesJESSE GREENYear of the DramedyIf 2023 was a tragedy in the world, on New York stages it was a dramedy year, highlighted not only by serious plays with great jokes, but also by flat-out comedies with dark underpinnings. Its residents included an unemployed man in his 50s, his barely-holding-on mother, a pregnant woman, two refugees — and us. Seated adjacent to the facility’s dingy common room, we became, in the playwright’s own staging, fellow residents. But if the others eyed us like we might steal a precious sandwich, we could blithely leave when the play was over. The New York Theater Workshop audience, too, learned a great deal, as the questions bedeviling so many relationships — the complexity of consent and the meaning of control — played out before us in this perfectly timed hot-button play.

Persons: Jesse Green’s, Alexander Zeldin, ”, Henrik Ibsen, Jessica Chastain, Nora, Jamie Lloyd’s, Amy Herzog, Chastain, Liliana Padilla, —, gorgeously, Rachel Chavkin, Steph Paul Organizations: Armory, Zeldin, bros, New York Locations: New York, York City, Norway, New York City

☆ Review: A Shady Documentary Becomes a Weapon of War in ‘Spain’
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-30 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In Silverman’s telling, the filmmaker, Joris Ivens, a Dutchman working in the United States, is already an undercover infiltrator for Soviet interests when the Spanish Civil War breaks out in 1936. Ivens was a real filmmaker, and his movie “The Spanish Earth,” released in 1937, was a real cause célèbre among leftists and artists. The frenemies Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos did write the screenplay, as Silverman relates. (He imagines shooting part of the documentary from an ant’s point-of-view, or a raindrop’s.) Nor, for all his faults, was Hemingway (Danny Wolohan) so complete a buffoon, given to shouting such hollow nonsense.

Persons: ”, Jen Silverman’s “, ” That’s, Joris Ivens, “, Rich, Franco, Ivens, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Silverman, Andrew Burnap, Hemingway, Danny Wolohan, Dos Passos, Erik Lochtefeld Organizations: Republican, Rich Fascist Locations: Jen Silverman’s “ Spain, United States, Spanish, Spain, Dos

☆ ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Review: How Alicia Keys Got Her Groove
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-19 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Even in the Golden Age of musical theater, shows so commonly died after intermission that critics came up with a name for the disease. “Second act trouble” presented in many ways: unmoored songs, desperate cutting, illogical crises, hasty workarounds. Yet all those second act symptoms arose from the same underlying condition: first act ambitions. So it’s not really surprising that an enormously ambitious new musical like “Hell’s Kitchen,” the semi-autobiographical jukebox built on the life and catalog of Alicia Keys, disappoints after the mid-show break, tumbling directly into the potholes it spent its first half so smartly avoiding. And since those songs are the show’s selling point, they wind up wagging the story.

Persons: ”, it’s, Alicia Keys, disappoints, Kristoffer Diaz, Michael Greif, Ali Organizations: Public, verve Locations: Jersey, Midtown Manhattan

☆ ‘Spamalot’ Review: You’ll Laugh in Its General Direction
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-16 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

If you’ve seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 1975 movie spoof of all things Arthurian and many things not, you know the coconuts I mean. And if you’re enough of a Python fan to have also seen “Spamalot,” the 2005 Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” from the film, you’ve probably memorized the whole bit. That’s the one in which Arthur’s trusted patsy, Patsy, slaps coconut halves together so the deluded king can pretend he has a horse. Among many others, so are a troupe of self-flagellating monks, a cart of corpses, a vulgar French taunter and a Trojan rabbit. This one, directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, gives the “ni”-sayers what they want.

Persons: Monty Python, “, you’ve, Arthur’s, patsy, Patsy, James, Eric Idle, John Du Prez, ”, Josh Rhodes, sayers Organizations: St Locations: England

☆ ‘Scene Partners’ Review: Is She Brilliant? Demented? Both?
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-15 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“Acting Like a Maniac” is not your typical acting class: You have to sign a personal injury waiver to join it. But then Meryl Kowalski, with that double whammy of a theatrical name, isn’t your typical student. Though 75, she’s no cute oldster; Hugo Lockerby, the guru-like teacher with a wandering accent, thinks she may even be a genius. “Scene Partners,” by John J. Caswell Jr., with the transcendent Dianne Wiest as Meryl, is definitely more like whoa. In any case, it’s often impossible to tell whether what we’re watching is Meryl’s life, a film about her life, a dream about the film, a hallucination of the dream, or some other nesting doll of narration.

Persons: Meryl Kowalski, Hugo Lockerby, John J, Caswell Jr, Dianne Wiest Locations: Soviet Union, Meryl’s

☆ ‘Harmony’ Review: Barry Manilow Writes the (Broadway) Songs
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-13 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

How strange and, in the end, how ironic that a German singing group, founded in the chaotic last years of the Weimar Republic and forcibly disbanded less than 10 years later, should call itself the Comedian Harmonists. Yet on the evidence of the Barry Manilow musical “Harmony” — for which, yes, he wrote the songs (along with his longtime lyricist, Bruce Sussman) — the internationally famous all-male group had the “harmonist” part of their name just right. Neither the guys nor the grim and eventually bludgeoning show have a gift for levity. Though its title makes it sound as if “Harmony” would be calm and golden, its story isn’t an uplifting one. Soon the brotherhood, symbolized in sound by their questing choral closeness, goes sour — a story that, to be effective, needs vivid contrast so we know what’s been lost.

Persons: Harmonists, Barry Manilow, Bruce Sussman, —, Manilow, what’s Organizations: Socialism Locations: Weimar Republic

☆ ‘Pal Joey’ Review: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildering
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-02 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

It’s not often that the standout star of a show is its music supervisor, arranger or orchestrator, but in the gala presentation of “Pal Joey” at New York City Center through Sunday, all three are one man, Daryl Waters. That the rest of the revival (really a new creature, made from spare parts) is more suggestive than convincing is no crime; there has never been a satisfactory “Pal Joey.” Though the 1940 original featured some soon-to-be standards by Rodgers and Hart — “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” chief among them — its book by John O’Hara, based on his epistolary novel and New Yorker stories, didn’t match them in tone or dramatic serviceability. Back then, the problem was thought to be the nature of Joey himself, a greasy heel trying to scheme his way from itinerant crooner to supper club smoothie. Along the way he picked up and discarded an innocent named Linda English, traded sex for financial support with a socialite named Vera Simpson and generally ruined everything he touched with his grifty hands. The problem faced by the various would-be saviors of “Pal Joey” — there were Broadway revivals in 1952, 1963, 1976 and 2008 — is rather what new throughline to impose and how to make the best use of its songs.

Persons: It’s, “ Pal Joey ”, Daryl Waters, Waters, ’, ”, Pal Joey, Rodgers, Hart —, John O’Hara, Joey himself, Linda English, Vera Simpson, Brooks Atkinson, J, Pierrepont Finch, Sweeney Todd, Evan Hansen, “ Pal Joey ” — Organizations: New York City Center, “, New York Times Locations: New, ’ Da, York , New York

☆ ‘Infinite Life’ Review: Is There a Cure for Pain and Desire?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-12 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

But if you think you see where that’s going, you will be both right and wrong; Baker’s structures are so strong and yet open that, within them, anything or its opposite may happen at any moment. “Infinite Life” (a co-production with Britain’s National Theater) gets that and more from James Macdonald, who has notably staged plays by Baker in London and by the British playwright Caryl Churchill here in New York. Indeed, “Infinite Life” most closely reminded me of Churchill’s great “Escaped Alone,” in which four women sit in a garden chatting into the apocalypse. They are all expressions of Baker’s refusal to reduce the world to a unitary lesson; “Infinite Life” offers moral philosophy but no moral. Which, by the way, is what “Daniel Deronda,” past page 152, is about — and “Infinite Life” is always.

Persons: James Macdonald, Baker, Caryl Churchill, “, Macdonald, Tennessee Williams, Albee, Nielsen, Ásta Bennie Hostetter, Birdsong, Bray, Isabella Byrd’s, ” Sofi, Daniel Deronda, Linda Gross Organizations: Britain’s, New York, Linda, Linda Gross Theater Locations: London, British, New York, Tennessee, Manhattan

☆ Have You Met My Collaborator? He’s So Classic, He’s Dead.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-05 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

On Broadway, Off Broadway, in special events and out of town, living authors are collaborating with dead ones. Some otherwise viable shows, like “Annie Get Your Gun,” need surgery because their racial or gender assumptions are now unacceptable. Others, like “Show Boat,” are merely falling out of copyright, with heirs eager to find a way to remonetize their property. And some — well one — are “Here We Are,” the musical Stephen Sondheim was working on when he died in November 2021. Directed by Joe Mantello and with a book by the comic playwright David Ives, it will reflect a very unusual collaboration indeed.

Persons: Amber Ruffin, Oz, Richard LaGravenese, Daniel Koa Beaty, John O’Hara’s, “ Pal Joey ”, Rodgers, Hart, John Weidman’s revisal, Annie, Stephen Sondheim, Michael Paulson, Sondheim, Luis Buñuel, ”, Joe Mantello, David Ives

☆ Review: In Central Park, ‘The Tempest’ Sings Farewell to Magic
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-31 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“The isle is full of noises,” sings Caliban, and on Tuesday night it certainly was. Yet all of them melted away, as they usually do, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater’s new musical version of “The Tempest” was giving its opening-night performance. “The Tempest” makes for a fitting farewell, having opened the series, in a different adaptation, in 2013. That “Tempest” introduced the innovative Public Works idea: civic theater made for everyone, with members of local community organizations performing alongside professional actors. He must also release from servitude his chief sprite, Ariel, and his monstrous slave, Caliban.

Persons: ”, birdsong, Benjamin Velez, Laurie Woolery, pang, Shakespeare, Prospero, Miranda Organizations: Helicopters, Public Locations: Manhattan, Central Park

☆ Review: Is William Finn’s ‘A New Brain’ a Stroke of Genius?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-24 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

First comes the piano, then the bed. In between, in Barrington Stage Company’s revival of “A New Brain,” a dejected man named Gordon Schwinn plunks out the first halting notes of a song he’s writing. In this musical, with songs by William Finn and a book by him and James Lapine, the prominence of the piano and the bed is no accident; they are the poles of Schwinn’s, or any artist’s, existence. For “A New Brain,” first seen at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998, Finn shaped the givens of his idiosyncratic songwriting style and of the stroke that nearly killed him in 1992 into a show that somehow transcends both. If you could never mistake its silliness and sadness for anyone else’s work, you could never miss, in its intimations of mortality, how it inevitably speaks to everyone.

Persons: ”, Gordon Schwinn plunks, William Finn, James Lapine, Finn, givens Organizations: Lincoln Center Theater Locations: Barrington

☆ Review: A Bloodless Postscript to ‘Jaws’ in ‘The Shark Is Broken’
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-10 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For nine weeks in 1974, off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, the shooting of “Jaws” was repeatedly delayed by the whims of its temperamental stars. Bruce was the name given to the three mechanical predators built to simulate the great white shark at the heart of the story. Occasionally they wondered if it might not have been better to train an actual great white for the role. After seeing “The Shark Is Broken,” a play about that disastrous shoot, you may wonder the opposite: whether it might not have been better to cast the movie with mechanical humans. All of that is faithfully rendered in “The Shark Is Broken,” which opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, in a production directed by Guy Masterson.

Persons: ”, Bruce, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider bickered, Guy Masterson, There’s, Duncan Henderson, Adam Cork, John Williams’s Locations: Martha’s

☆ Can These Three Much-Loved Musicals Ever Be Truly Revived?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-08 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Like the movie, it was a blast, even if its satire, coming from all directions, seemed to have no target. (Much of what it pokes fun at are the conventions of musicals themselves.) Last year at Stratford, “The Rocky Horror Show” suffered from a similar problem — but recent Stratford productions of “Chicago,” “The Music Man” and “Guys and Dolls” (all directed and choreographed by Donna Feore) did not. (We’ll have a chance to find out with the arrival of a completely different “Spamalot” revival on Broadway this fall.) Maybe comedy needs to skip a few generations until minds that know nothing of migratory coconuts can test its enduring worth.

Persons: ”, Donna Feore, Lezlie Wade, Jesse Robb, “ Spamalot ” Organizations: “ Locations: Stratford, “, “ Chicago

☆ ‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-03 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage. And by star, I of course mean the car. Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.

Persons: ”, Marty McFly, Casey, Doc Brown, Roger Bart, John Rando Organizations: DeLorean

☆ Review: Young Bros and Maidens Harmonize in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-27 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

And this production, directed by Amanda Dehnert for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, intensifies the youth-crush factor with 10 emo songs. Let’s start with the charming: The catchy songs, by Dehnert and the Chicago-based composer André Pluess, tap the sappy heart of summer and are danceable to boot. That the songs don’t match the story structurally is probably an insuperable problem. “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” with or without the British “u,” is a very youthful, disjointed text, its thin thread of plot repeatedly cut by clowns, dullards, puns, pomposities and noodling that goes nowhere. By the time you get to the masque near the end, featuring impenetrable spoofs of the nine classical “worthies,” you may doubt young Shakespeare’s judgment of worthiness.

Persons: Shakespeare, callow, Amanda Dehnert, Hudson, Dehnert, André Pluess, ” Organizations: Shakespeare Locations: Chicago

☆ Review: Dancing With Dictators in David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-20 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Not that there isn’t plenty to praise in “Here Lies Love,” the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened on Thursday at the Broadway Theater. Because the real star of this show is the astonishing architectural transformation of the theater itself, by the set designer David Korins. That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of “Here Lies Love” — with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. For here we are, at the place where irony and meta-messaging form a theatrical-historical knot that can’t be picked apart. Which is why, as you clap, you should probably wonder what for.

Persons: Imelda Marcos, David Byrne, Fatboy Slim, abetted, David Korins, “ King Kong ”, Marcos, impoverishing, Justin Townsend, Peter Nigrini, Cody Spencer — Organizations: Broadway Theater, Broadway Locations: “ King, Philippines

Search resuls for: "More About Jesse Green"

17 mentions found