Roy Sorrels
The current production of The Elephant Man is curiously out of balance. It strains to soar into the realm of mesmerizing theatrical magic with brilliant acting by Billy Crudup in the title role, but it is tethered by several ...
Roy Sorrels
Somewhere in the true story of poet-scholar-novelist Robert Graves and his lover Laura Riding, also a respected poet, there may indeed be buried a dramatic and compelling play, but Glamour by John O'Keefe does not unearth it. Many of ...
Roy Sorrels
Three old ladies, sisters who have lived all their lives in a small Texas town, tell interminable tales about characters the audience never sees, and about incidents from their pasts that have minimal intrinsic interest. The characters they talk ...
Gerald Rabkin
In Act II of Chekhov's The Sea Gull, the infatuated young Nina gushes to the attractive visiting writer, Trigorin, about how exalting it must be to be a great artist. He bemusedly replies that yes, he knows that his ...
Larry Campbell
The 1927 musical Strike Up the Band was the first collaboration between the Gershwin brothers, George (music) and Ira (lyrics), and librettist George S. Kaufman, whose comedies written with Moss Hart (The Man Who Came to Dinner) are classics ...
Roy Sorrels
Suzanne Bachner's hilarious and moving play, Circle, is about that most noisily merry and profoundly distressing of subjects, sex. It is hard to imagine an audience member so straitlaced, so together, so "normal" that he or she would not ...
Gerald Rabkin
Online references on Arthur Miller "It's hard to hold a pen with a clenched fist," said Ralph Ellison, and works of art inspired by contemporary political grievance do not do well in the survivability ...
Roy Sorrels
Edward Albee's new play is puzzling, powerful, bawdy, disturbing and deeply weird. It challenges a viewer to decide whether what seems to be happening in the world of the play is really happening, and once that conclusion has been ...
In Richard Greenberg's fascinating and flawed new play, The Dazzle, the central character, Langley Collyer, seems to be a direct descendant of some weird Swiftian creation. Collyer has a whole mansion that he fills with the things (here, imagine ...
Arthur Lazere
Thirty years after his death, the plays of No�l Coward continue to be performed with great frequency, an indication both of public popularity and of roles that make desirable vehicles for actors to do star turns. Broadway will see ...
