On the night she conceives, Serafina Delle Rose (Marisa Tomei) wakes up with a burning sensation on her breast. It was a “pain like a needle,” she tells a friend, “quick, quick, hot little stitches.” When she undresses, Serafina sees her husband’s rose tattoo on her own chest: a sign that they are going to […]
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Following Joel Grey as the Emcee in Cabaret is a bit like following Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire or, I would imagine, Mark Rylance in Jerusalem. Mr. Grey is one of those performers who seems like he learned to entertain before he learned to crawl, and his Emcee is both attractive and repellent, with a face […]
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Critics are having a blast beating David Mamet’s newest play, The Anarchist, to a pulp, but something about this strikes me as culturally self-mutilating. Of course, we have a history of snubbing our greatest playwrights. How often do we see a Broadway revival of Williams that is not Streetcar or Cat on a Hot Tin […]
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Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit is yet another entry in the never-ending American tradition of theater about angry drunk families who have secrets that will be revealed after the intermission. You know these people already: Williams’ Kowalskis, O’Neill’s Tyrones, and Albee’s George, Martha, Nick and Honey. Last year, we suffered through Jon Robin Baitz’s unimaginative, stultifying Other […]
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A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the few perfect American plays, a mammoth masterpiece that puts most of our theater to shame. It must be intimidating to launch a revival as each new cast will always play their parts in the shadows of such giants as Karl Malden, Vivien Leigh, and, of course, Marlon […]
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