Glenda Jackson is brilliant. Throughout Three Tall Women, her craggy face—one Beckett would have loved—alternately radiates wisdom, confusion, knowing cynicism, and puckish amusement, all with a firmly-pursed upper lip. The primary difference, I think, between stage and film acting is the requirement for stage actors to use all of their body. Too frequently, this means a series […]
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A Brief History of Women, the new play by Alan Ayckbourn, bears a somewhat misleading title. It is really the history of a home, specifically Kirkbridge Manor, which between 1925 and 1985 serves a variety of purposes: as a Georgian country house, as a preparatory school, as an arts center, and finally as a hotel. […]
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There’s no getting around it: Joshua Jackson is a bad actor. As James Leeds, the dashing new speech teacher at a school for the deaf, he spends most of Children of a Lesser God signing and interpreting the signs of others. This masks a tendency to saw the air, even when the ASL doesn’t call […]
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Bedlam is a troupe of actors best known for their small-cast stagings of large-scale plays: there was the four-person Hamlet, and before that the four-person Saint Joan. In 2015, they began performing two versions of Twelfth Night in repertory—this required expanding the company to five. In between their appearances in New York, artistic director Eric Tucker and his […]
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The set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, is extraordinary. Snow falls throughout, first in large heaps and then intermittently, its color reflected in the large white arches and pale furniture; the actors, dwarfed by their monochromatic surroundings, bring a little relief with their colorful costumes. But the main effect—a sheet of white peppered with spots of […]
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Because it is the Jimmy Buffett jukebox musical, Escape to Margaritaville, I suspect, will never get the praise and esteem it deserves. What a shame. This is a delightful two and a half hours, a paean to cargo shorts and day drinking that avoids nearly all the pitfalls of the genre. While Mamma Mia!, for example, practically […]
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Jordan Harrison’s new play The Amateurs is about the invention of the subject, the moment when humans began to conceive of themselves in terms of “I.” Mr. Harrison locates this change during the Middle Ages, when the plague reinvented our relationship to death.
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