A judgment call for parents: When is it appropriate to introduce children to challenging cultural material " whether it is sexy or profane, creepy or violent, or simply adult and intense?
As President Obama and Mitt Romney debate Monday, theatrical presentation will be scrutinized. But personalities should lead to ideas.The final presidential debate between President Obama an…
Author Tony Cointreau and philanthropist Jim Russo, show Theater Talk some highlights of their good friend Ethel Merman's personal notebook, including recipes for her favorite, quick and eas…
A new Samuel Beckett festival was inaugurated in Enniskillen, a town in Northern Ireland that until now was more famous for a troubled past than for the arts.
Two solo shows at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival ""A Word or Two" and "Hirsch"" illuminate the deeply personal nature of theater artists' relation to their work.
The character, now in the musical at the Ahmanson Theatre, is beloved — and radical.No, that's not a UFO hovering over the Music Center. It happens to be Mary Poppins, who has glided b…
William Friedkin's film of Tracy Letts' play leaves little to the imagination, and that can really mess up your mind.William Friedkin's film of Tracy Letts' play"Killer Joe" is nasty, brutis…
Soho Rep's 'Uncle Vanya' takes its time while Sydney Theatre's version moves at a quick pace. Each staging is effective, and each shows how timeless Chekhov can be.NEW YORK — Anton Che…
Are we really living in a post-racial world? It seems like we’re back in the 1990s, when all hell broke loose on Broadway after the British star Jonathan Pryce was cast as the Eurasian…
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rou…
It is necessary, once a writer has made some kind of discovery or experienced some kind of epiphany, to put that discovery and epiphany at arm’s length — to contemplate it and ma…
Yesterday I went through my first version of the Erlkönig play which I started last year under the title of The Elf King; of the 30 pages I completed then, perhaps two of them will end up i…
How to endure under the burden of acknowledged despair: when that which was to raise him over the limits of the earth drowns him in the sea instead (a comic twist and reversal), when the onl…
The decision to embrace an aesthetic of asceticism, of essentialism, of restraint is essentially a moral decision, a decision easier to make for those who already have an affinity with it, w…
In Britain the Belarus Free Theater's "Minsk, 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker" depicts sex as a magnet for political repression, while Philip Ridley's "Mercury Fur" prepares a party in a lawles…
Full of the gritty textures of the '70s, August Wilson's play does something today's artists should emulate — reveal how rooted we are in our uniquely styled moment of history.The noti…
A bikini-clad Helen of Troy parties poolside, Cressida cloaks her face in a head scarf and the troops lob hand grenades in Rob Melrose’s shock and awe “Troilus and Cressida.̶…
