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Theater Review | Cirkus Cirkör: In This Ring of the Circus, the Amazing Risk Tamers

How much you enjoy “Inside Out,” the moody blend of modern and traditional circus by the Swedish troupe Cirkus Cirkör depends to a large degree on whether you’ve recently seen Cirque du Soleil. This tastefully appointed spectacle, which imagines two ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  13 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Cirque du Soleil,  Brooklyn Academy of Music

Theater Review | 'Red Sea Fish': A Tough Dad, a Weak Son, a Dead Mom: The Usual

As soon as Ray, a working-class English brute wearing a white mask of skin cream, finishes off the first scene with the zinger “Let the freak show commence,” it’s clear that “Red Sea Fish” doesn’t take place in the dreary British flat onstage so much ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  12 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Matt Wilkinson

Jason Zinoman on Robert Mckee

Just as financiers make pilgrimages to Omaha to hear Warren Buffett and aspiring Jedi knights travel to the ends of the galaxy to hang upside down in front of Yoda, screenwriters, with dreams of summer blockbusters dancing in their heads, periodically ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, Vanity Fair,  10 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Charlie Kaufman,  Warren Buffett,  Nicholas Cage,  Vanity Fair,  David Mamet

Theater Review | 'Such Things Only Happen in Books': Domesticity, Strait-Laced With Dry Wit

I always thought that the Keen Company’s mission statement that it “produces sincere plays” could be improved to “sincerity forever,” to borrow a title from a Mac Wellman comedy. But that would be glib and maybe a little insincere, and the thing about ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  2 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Thornton Wilder,  Harold Clurman,  Woody Allen

Theater Review |'Antigone': Sophoclean Tragedy, Served Neat

Sitting around a sturdy square table dressed in business casual minus footwear, the debaters in Anne Bogart’s staging of “Antigone” look as if they were at a corporate retreat. They present their arguments cleanly, with little fuss, and then, when ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  29 Oct 2009

Related Topics: Dance Theater Workshop,  Anne Bogart

Theater Review | 'Americana Kamikaze': Japanese-Style Horror, on Screen and Stage

Speaking inside boxes the size of coffins, the haunted souls of “Americana Kamikaze” inhabit a world that depending on the moment, appears impossibly vast or claustrophobically intimate. Refracting a Japanese ghost story through an American ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  26 Oct 2009

Theater Review | 'Hansel and Gretel': Makeover for a Brother-and-Sister Act

You could say that the current entertainment at the New Victory Theater provides an adult spin on “Hansel and Gretel,” but that would be a misreading of the German cautionary tale. After all, the original begins with abandonment and moves on to ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  19 Oct 2009

Related Topics: New Victory Theater

Theater Review | 'Ghost Light': A Creepy Threesome: A Ghost Kills the Mood for a Motel Tryst

“You know what they say,” the actor Brian (Bryant Mason) remarks in “Ghost Light,” a creaky haunted house of a play. “Horror just doesn’t work onstage.” This self-conscious wink attempts to yank you out of the drama before jerking you right back in, ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  18 Oct 2009

Related Topics: Vincent Price,  H.P. Lovecraft,  Timothy Haskell,  Roman Polanski,  William Friedkin

Theater Review | 'The Archery Contest': Stripping Away Covers to Lay Truths Bare at P.S. 122

Like presents that take more time to wrap than to buy, the attractive actors in “The Archery Contest” make less of an impression than the stunning white box that contains them. On the second floor of P.S. 122 the audience surrounds the enclosed playing ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  8 Oct 2009

Related Topics: John Jahnke,  Robert Wilson

Theater Review | 'Mahida's Extra Key to Heaven': Fretting About All That ‘Fuss and Bother’ in the Middle East

When a sensitive Iranian writer, Mahida (Roxanna Hope), meets a sweetly amiable American painter, Thomas (a charming James Wallert), on a pier in a small town in the United States, the conversation quickly turns metaphorical. “I think about borders all ...

From JASON ZINOMAN, The New York Times,  8 Oct 2009

Related Topics: Roxanna Hope,  James Wallert,  Russell Davis,  Will Pomerantz,  Peter Norton

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