Classic plays don’t require updates or new translations to stay fresh, but if they are indeed classics, they can withstand new interpretations.
Theater
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
‘A Case for the Existence of God’ is not a theological argument. It’s a parable.
Hard truths spill out in the tentative friendship of two men in Samuel D. Hunter’s Off Broadway play, “A Case for the Existence of God.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Two new Broadway musicals show the pitfalls of turning complex history into song and dance
With “Suffs” and “Paradise Square,” Broadway offers two new musicals that address the great animating subject of the American musical: America itself.
Posted inArts & Culture, Interviews
The Bob Dylan Bible: In ‘Girl From the North Country,’ an Irish playwright takes inspiration from the prophet of folk
“Bob Dylan is in the tradition of great writers stretching back to the biblical prophets—there’s something in his songs that is so resonant that people will be trying to figure the songs out for generations.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ has been set to ballet. It won’t meet your expectations (in a good way).
In making the poem into a ballet with original music, much has been gained, both for the significance of the new ballet and for a fresh appreciation and engagement with its source.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘Assassins’ & ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ — the three ghosts of the 2021 Christmas season
Seeing these shows, I was reminded of Dickens’s famous ghosts, warning us about where we have been, where we are and where, if we’re not careful, we may be headed.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Broadway is (finally) embracing Black writers. But the work of diversifying theater is just getting started.
Can Black writers flourish in a marketplace dictated by white tastes?
Posted inArts & Culture, Film
Review: In Steven Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story,’ every element sings — and every moment counts
What this quintessential stage musical needed, apparently, was a thoroughgoing cinematic makeover.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Why do so many Jesuits love Stephen Sondheim? His art was a costly vocation.
Sondheim’s stories and lyrics always seemed to be addressing you personally. You couldn’t simply watch his musicals. Eventually you had to contend with them.
Posted inArts & Culture, Film
Netflix’s ‘Tick, Tick…Boom!’ is a miraculous resurrection of an artist we lost too soon
“Tick, Tick … Boom!” is also a soul-deep tribute by Lin-Manuel Miranda to an artist who inspired him at a formative age.