John Heilpern

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 »

And so it’s back to the ’50s (again). “All plays are dated,” Harold Clurman wrote in steadfast support of Clifford Odets in 1970. “They are products of their time.” Yes; but everything depends on how much the dated-ness shows.

In the current Broadway revival of Odets’econd to last play, The Country Girl, it shows too much. Odets himself described the play as superficial, and he is correct. Even Clurman, who first produced the revolutionary conscience plays of Odets in the 1930s when they worked together at the Group Theatre, conceded that The Country Girl is more about the actors in it than the play—or potboiler—itself.  read more »

And so, back to the ’50s (again), with the consciously modest Broadway musical A Catered Affair.

Modesty doesn’t really suit Broadway; it implies “good taste,” discretion, refinement, art—Stephen Sondheim. The British director of A Catered Affair, John Doyle (of the recent minimalist Broadway revivals of Mr. Sondheim’s Company and Sweeney Todd), has treated what’s essentially a wheezing old potboiler as if it were a mini-opera. It’s a rare thing on Broadway in that sense: a tearjerker that induces no tears.  read more »

It’s no secret that much of our theater is living nostalgically in the 1950s. Coming to a theater near you: The Dancing Eisenhower Years. And why not?  read more »

Call me a cockeyed pessimist. While everyone else in the audience at Lincoln Center’s loving revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 South Pacific seemed to be in heaven, I thought I was in a retirement home.

Now, now … before I’m drummed out of town, let me say that the score is an unequalled romantic gem. But you know that.  read more »

Whether you’re seeing Gypsy for the first (or fourth or fifth) time, you’ll want to catch Arthur Laurents’ revival starring Patti LuPone at the St. James Theatre. For one thing, Gypsy is among the very best musicals ever written, and we assume that by now the 90-year-old Mr. Laurents—who created the masterly book in 1959, and is directing the show for the third time—knows what he’s doing.

He’s like a museum keeper with the only set of keys. When Sam Mendes directed the revisionist Gypsy with Bernadette Peters on Broadway five years ago, traditionalists took offense (including, reportedly, Mr. Laurents). Don’t mess with Mama Rose! (Or else.) Gypsy, the musical for people who hate their mothers, arouses intense feelings.  read more »

You might want to think twice about seeing Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? at the Public Theatre. The radical politics of the distinguished feminist playwright aren’t giving me pause; it’s the $50 tickets that trouble me.

I’m no mathematician, but by my reckoning, $50 for an evening lasting 45 minutes amounts to $3,852 a minute. If you ask me—and please do—that’s outrageous. It’s a lot. Facts don’t lie.  read more »

It’s a funny old job being a critic. Each week, I confidently—fairly confidently—offer a point of view about a show. Yet if someone asks me personally what show to see, I wish they wouldn’t.

I don’t want to feel responsible if they have a horrible time. Only recently some friends of mine from out of town were planning a Broadway treat for the family and asked what I thought about Spring Awakening. I replied without thinking, “You’ll love it.” Because I did.  read more »

It’s amazing that choreographer Debbie Allen’s starry Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—the first all-black version—can have so much plain wrong with it, yet still delight me. But consider this: No great playwright ever wrote so badly and so beautifully within the same play as Tennessee Williams (unless it was Eugene O’Neill).

I love Williams in spite of his flaws and because of them. He’s our poet of tender mercies who put onstage the large, damaged hearts of the dispossessed.  read more »

In Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone, there’s a wonderfully ghoulish true story about a cell phone that started ringing inside a coffin.

It happened in Belgium some five years ago: The grieving family of the deceased had gathered at the funeral parlor to say a private, loving farewell around the sealed coffin when they suddenly heard a cell phone ringing inside. (What makes it worse—or funnier—is that the badly shaken family subsequently sued the undertakers for negligence).  read more »

This week I report on a new musical about suicidal depression, a new play about suicidal loneliness and the revival of a classic play that hinges on suicide. And how are you today?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the novel theme of Next to Normal, the soft-rock musical about the middle-class mom who’s a clinically depressed pill freak. Sitting across the aisle during the performance I attended at Second Stage Theatre was Stephen Sondheim, the founding father of the modern musical: urban desperation and neurosis (Company); the ravages of time and old age (Follies); Grand Guignol murder (Sweeny Todd); love and physical ugliness (Passion); lunatics and presidential slaughter (Assassins); or even newly opened diplomatic relations between isolationist America and the Japanese in 1852 (Pacific Overtures).  read more »

Rupert Goold’s production of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart has arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from London, where it was widely acclaimed as “definitive” and “the experience of a lifetime.” Though the gifted Mr. Goold’s opening scene is brilliantly unnerving, I’m not so sure that a Macbeth that doesn’t go on to terrify you can be one for the ages.

“All is the fear and nothing is the love” is the keynote of Shakespeare’s dark, monstrous tragedy of political ambition and desire.  read more »

Why are New Yorker writers so stage-struck? Betrayed, George Packer’s adaptation of his 16,000-word New Yorker feature of the same name that exposed the U.S. government’s shameful indifference to the fate of its loyal Iraqi employees in Baghdad, is a memorable contribution to downtown’s Culture Project. It’s Mr. Packer’s first play, and it’s a trend.

Only a year ago, The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, made his stage debut at Culture Project in a solo performance of his own script, My Trip to Al-Qaeda. At this rate, Anthony Lane will be performing his collected movie reviews. And why not? Henry James was famously stage-struck and look what happened to him. (All his plays were a bust.)  read more »

What makes people laugh? Or, as David Mamet’s hapless President Smith asks in November, “Well, who’s to say what’s perjury?”

In a moment of mock seriousness during Mr. Mamet’s broad—very broad—political farce, the president’s speechwriter, who’s an activist lesbian known as Bernstein, muses sentimentally on this great nation of ours and on the mysterious nature of comedy itself:  read more »

Is it a new day in America with Barack Obama?  read more »

A year without a new play by Sir David Hare can’t be all bad—and so it happily proved.

Top of my list is the stunning, imaginative achievement of Gregory Burke’s Black Watch—the first docudrama about war I’ve seen to successfully turn reportage into art, and the first play about the Iraq war to tell its story from the point of view of the soldiers. It was a political play that—praise be!—didn’t preach to the choir. To the contrary, it frequently wrong-footed us. It took us all as close to the experience of war as any of us is ever likely to get, thank God. Its ensemble of unknown Scottish actors was superb. And it left us in tears.

Many theatergoers had to be turned away during its sold-out run at St. Ann’s Warehouse. It would be a smashing gift to New York if Black Watch returned in the New Year.  read more »

Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming (1965) is the dysfunctional family play of the modern era that redefined domestic drama. It established Mr. Pinter’s international reputation, and remains the most emotionally and verbally violent of all his memorable portraits of suppressed feeling.  read more »

When it comes to theater, I’m an unapologetic elitist. Before I’m hissed in the streets, I ought to clarify that I believe theater should be completely and democratically open—but popularity isn’t everything.

The only good move that would make theater honestly accessible isn’t to lower artistic standards, but rather the ludicrously high ticket prices. Don’t mess with the art. A theater of excellence is one that takes us up along with it; a dumbed-down theater inevitably takes us down. But we don’t call that theater.  read more »

It’s not a good sign, perhaps, that the first show out of the gate after the Broadway strike, Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention, should be about the discovery of theater’s mortal enemy, television. Worse: Mr. Sorkin (creator of The West Wing) has written the kind of pseudo-historical docudrama that would be perfect for television.

At least the play’s technical gobbledygook about cathode ray tubes is marginally easier to grasp than Copenhagen’s Heisenberg principle. It’s not really meant to be understood, however. It’s there to envelop us like fog. Science lessons work quite well on Broadway, making us feel good about ourselves.

The evening begins with RCA mogul David Sarnoff (a somber Hank Azaria) informing us about the mystery of light. “Light bounces,” he announces, “and I wanted to make sure everyone knew that, or 20 minutes in you’re gonna be thinking, ‘What the hell is happening?’”  read more »

Elizabeth LeCompte’s latest avant-garde experiment in high-tech disorientation and miked automatons might be described as the world’s first karaoke production of Hamlet.  read more »

Edward Albee’s Peter and Jerry is a wholly successful evening at the Second Stage, a reminder—if any were needed—that Mr. Albee’s soul-sick inmates at the zoo still have the power to disturb us greatly.  read more »

Where did Young Frankenstein go wrong?  read more »

There are three and a half good reasons to celebrate Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll: the three star actors from England and the second act of the play.  read more »

In all the discussion about the welcome if uneven revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, it seems to me that the genius of the play itself has been forgotten. Blame the musical.  read more »

Put simply, it’s essential that you see Black Watch at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse: It’s among the most compelling theater pieces you could wish to see.  read more »

The recent and sadly brief visit of Peter Stein’s wonderful Electra with the National Theater of Greece was a joy to me, if only because this supreme production returned the theater to its life source—namely the dramatist. Nothing, I believe, could be timelier or more important.  read more »

Theresa Rebeck’s new play Mauritius has just opened at the Biltmore on Broadway—why?  read more »

The acclaimed avant-garde director Ivo van Hove has come up with an unusual attempt to invigorate Molière’s 17th-century masterpiece The Misanthrope: He’s thrown garbage at it.  read more »

Adam Rapp must be the first playwright to take pro wrestling as a metaphor for the fucked-up family life and culture of America.  read more »

The achievement of Ian McKellen’s King Lear is that he’s the first I’ve seen to fully convey the horribleness of monstrous old age.  read more »

Charles Mee, one of the village elders of the New York avant-garde scene, is being honored by the Signature Theatre Company with his own season, a richly deserved accolade.  read more »

The $450 top ticket price for the new Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein is shocking in this regard: Why so little?  read more »

Shakespeare’s difficult late romance and wintry fable has frequently defeated the best, and yet for the first hour this smashing production could do no wrong in my astonished eyes.  read more »

What if the play can’t begin to compete with the music? That’s mostly my response, I regret, to Opus, Michael Hollinger’s melodramatic new play with music (by Beethoven, Bartok and Bach).  read more »

<i>Absinthe</i> is an alternative, downtown circus for adults that’s a bizarre hybrid of carnival sideshow, variety acts, schlock comedy and a whiff of Weimar in the night.  read more »

Where Mamma Mia! flirts with kitsch, Xanadu on Broadway laps up kitsch and flirts with the audience.  read more »

Anything goes with Shakespeare in the Park. But at what point, I wonder, did the director and designer of the Public Theater’s Romeo and Juliet cry out, “Eureka! We’ve got it!”  read more »

There's an awful lot of dramaturgy for one Greek myth.  read more »

The eight interlocking Ayckbourn plays that make up Intimate Exchanges are a theatrical jigsaw puzzle.  read more »

It’s a little bit unfortunate that the final episode of The Sopranos will air at the same time as the 61st annual Tony Awards ceremony on Sunday, June 10. But I know which one I’ll be watching. Yes, siree!  read more »

I appear to be in an uncomfortable minority of one in not finding Donna Murphy’s talent as dazzling as her numerous adm