My excited interest in the production of The Bacchae during the Lincoln Center Festival was less about Euripides, good though he is. It was my admiration for the dynamic creative team who’ve taken a few liberties with the play (which premiered successfully in 405 B.C.).

The National Theatre of Scotland’s John Tiffany, The Bacchae’s director, and the leading Scottish playwright David Greig, who adapted it from a literal translation by Ian Ruffell, are the immense talents responsible for the modern masterpiece about Scottish soldiers in the Iraq war, Black Watch. I sang the praises of that production unreservedly last season, singling out its fantastic imaginative daring and simplicity.  read more »

Notes for and against Macbeth 2008, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, hailed by some as a theater visionary:

I think the avant-garde Polish director should have given his contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy a different title.

Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece, is famously based on Macbeth, but its title takes us directly into another world. Set in medieval Japan, the movie uses very little of Shakespeare’s language. Mr. Jarzyna’s Macbeth 2008, which has been compared to watching a movie onstage, is set in a blood-soaked U.S. war zone, and the director rarely uses Shakespeare’s language either. But his title links this production too closely to the original play, and sets up unfounded expectations.  read more »

Let me begin at the end.

Place: Central Park. Time: almost 11:45 p.m. Play: Hamlet. Spirits: low.

Fortinbras and his army have entered Denmark at last, signaling the end. Hamlet has just died—poisoned in the duel scene—and is probably glad to be out of it. The king, the queen, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—all now dead. Only decent Horatio survives—someone, according to W. H. Auden, who’s “not too bright, though he has read a lot and can repeat it.”

Oskar Eustis’ disappointingly literal production had been an uphill slog, and I mistakenly assumed the director would end in the conventional way: At Fortinbras’ command, four captains bear the body of Hamlet away like a soldier.  read more »

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman,” the interviewer begins genially, indicating a figure now entering dramatically from the wings. “The great American sculptor … Louise Nevelson.”

The audience applauds as if on cue. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Nevelson says. She’s alive?! You can’t tell the difference. You’re not meant to. Nevelson is being expertly impersonated by Mercedes Ruehl, who’s wearing a sort of kimono, sculptural necklace and trademark sable eyelashes (a set on each eye, lower and upper).

Where are we?

We’re in the Signature Theatre on 42nd Street. But we could be in a TV studio; the ingratiating interviewer could be James Lipton; the audience could be some kind of adoring, curious fan club; and, yes, Louise Nevelson could be alive and very well.  read more »

And so to the moment the nation and Patti LuPone have been waiting for—the Tony Awards on CBS, Sunday, June 15, at 8 p.m. What a great night it’ll be for Ms. LuPone and the diva’s devoted followers known as LuPonistas. It better be! But first things first:

Who do you think is going to take home the Tony for Best Sound Design of a Musical?  read more »

There’s a drama critic in every man (and woman, of course). Audiences can be pretty severe critics, and, in private, theater folk can be, too. An actor-writer by the name of Mike Daisey is a rarity, however: He goes onstage to criticize theater publicly.

And it pays off, apparently. Mr. Daisey’s How Theater Failed America has now moved from Joe’s Pub to the Barrow Street Theatre downtown, and judging by the enthusiastic response he received on a recent Saturday night, a lot of people are enjoying hearing him tell us how badly theater is doing.  read more »

It’s understandable if you think British theater holds up a burnished mirror to the bourgeois in the audience. Theater revolutions come and go, but no one absorbs them better than the spongy, resilient middle classes of England. For centuries, British theater has been dominated by the image of a white middle-class country. When have we seen a black or Asian character in the plays of Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn and David Hare?  read more »

If you ask me—and please do—who I’d like to see take home the Tony for best actor this season, it would be a genius named Mark Rylance.

Mark who?  read more »

When we think of the British playwrights we’re most familiar with, one is a political conservative for the thinking classes (Sir Tom Stoppard), another a safe middlebrow socialist for the carriage trade (Sir David Hare), and another a working-class sentimentalist for Off Broadway (the un-knighted Mike Leigh).

Where does that leave Caryl Churchill—the unrepentant Marxist-feminist poet who’s for nothing less than social, political and theatrical revolution? In my view, she’s England’s greatest living playwright.  read more »

I disagree with the critics who feel that Laura Linney has been miscast as the infamous sexual predator the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Ms. Linney’s controversial performance in the erratic Roundabout revival is living very dangerously indeed. Its unyielding ice coldness is overstylized, riveting in both its originality and waywardness, and ultimately a self-negating mistake, like an experiment in the wrong venue. But which other actress on Broadway, I wonder, is as daring as Ms. Linney?  read more »