Articles
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PTC's "Grey Gardens' (1st review)
Endless winter, in a summer town
In a decaying 28-room Easthampton mansion, surrounded by ghosts of their glittering past, a reclusive 80-year-old woman and her equally withdrawn 56-year-old daughter pass their days in bitter mutual recriminations. Everything about this production of Grey Gardens is first-rate, except for the one thing that really matters.
Articles
4 minute read
Orchestra 2001: Three composers, four soloists
The surprising 20th Century
Orchestra 2001 ended its season with a program guaranteed to please most audiences: four attractive concertos featuring four first-class soloists.
Articles
4 minute read
Anne-Marie Mulgrew's "SALT'
More than you ever wanted to know about salt
Anne-Marie Mulgrew's SALT is an ambitious choreographic exploration of one of the world's most vital commodities. But in its lack of focus and its technical imprecision, it comes across more like a scatterbrained doctoral thesis.
Articles
5 minute read
Philadelphia Orchestra's eclectic program
The turn of two centuries: Three Romantics and a modern
Guest conductor David Robertson, in an eclectic Philadelphia Orchestra program, offered three works of a century ago, and one of our own moment: the Philadelphia premiere of Thomas Ades's impressive new Violin Concerto, with Leila Josefowicz.
Articles
6 minute read
McPherson's "Seafarer' at the Arden (2nd Review)
When ensemble acting trumps a playwright's overreaching
The characters in The Seafarer may be losers, but the actors who portray them are exceptional. With one important exception, Conor McPherson's descent into the interior of Everyman succeeds.
Articles
4 minute read
Wagner's "Ring' cycle (Part 5: "Siegfried')
Siegfried: Wagner's All-American boy
Wagner's Siegfried is a dumb, muscular bully”“ a hard fellow to like. But 19th-Century Americans had no such problem: Wagner deliberately created an aggressive modern man who defies all the rules of the past, just like the Americans who were boldly opening the West by pushing aside everything that stood in their way.
Articles
7 minute read
Chamber Orchestra turns cautious
Et tu, Chamber Orchestra? Or: The bland leading the bland
After two seasons of adventurous programming, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia has reacted to hard economic times with a coming season that will offend nobody. Symphonic repertory in Philadelphia has become the musical equivalent of the menu at a high-end retirement community: pretty good, meal by meal, but deadly dull over the long run.
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McPherson's "Seafarer' at the Arden (1st review)
The Devil always gets the best lines
In Conor McPherson's new play, The Seafarer, Humanity's Oldest Friend visits four bibulous Dubliners on a Christmas Eve to collect an old debt from one of them. Though the play is flawed, the ensemble work of the all-male cast is as good as anything seen on local stages this season.
Articles
4 minute read
Terry Johnson's "Hysteria' at the Wilma
Fun with Sigmund and Salvador
Hysteria won Terry Johnson the 1994 Olivier Award for best new comedy in London, but this fictionalized account of a meeting between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali reminds us that the English have always had a different view of what passes for humor.
Articles
4 minute read
"The Producers' at the Walnut
Springtime for Hitler= winter for Wagner
In The Producers, Mel Brooks does to Nazi Germany what the Marx brothers did to Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera. But Brooks violates the conventional rules of comedy with such glee that you can't help laughing in spite of yourself. The opening number of the Walnut's lavish current production is worth the price of admission alone.
Articles
4 minute read