'Medea': Theater Review

Everyone toils away during Alice Birch's new play,Anatomy of a Suicide: The audience, which attempts to decipher three separate but interconnected storylines being depicted simultaneously; the actors, who display perfect, split-second timing as they deliver dialogue constructed with the complexity of a musical fugue; and most of all the British playwright herself, who has created this jigsaw puzzle of a theatrical event that seems less designed to convey its provocative themes than to illustrate

Money corrupts. Not just the possession of it, but the lack of it; and democracy, justice, human decency will all suffer at its hands.

In recent interviews, the playwright Tom Stoppard has mused that his latest, Leopoldstadt, may be his last work — not because he's planning on dying anytime soon, but he writes slowly, and you just never know when you're 82. If that's the case, then this heady drama, marbled with autobiographical echoes and career-long preoccupations, will provide a rewarding seam for a final chapter exegesis in future literary biographies.

It takes guts to admit you were wrong — especially when you have been so right, so often.

“Leopoldstadt,” the most slow-burn and personal work of 82-year-old Tom Stoppard’s long stage and screen career, is an intimate epic. It springs to astonishing dramatic life in a now bare, but once glorious apartment off Vienna’s Ringstrasse in 1955. The only problem is, for all the visceral emotional intensity of that scene, it forms less than the last quarter of a play that begins, two hours earlier, at the same address in 1899.

The title of Daniel Zaitchik's new musical provides a clue that it isn't simply going to be a story of boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy runs the danger of losing girl. Most musical love stories feature one character rapturously singing an ode about another.

A large part of what makes Ruth Negga such a distinctive screen presence, in films like Loving and Ad Astra, is the emotional transparency she brings to characterizations notable for their meticulous physical composure.

A musical drama about the imminent demise of a shipbuilding town in the North East of England, and a union’s last-ditch attempt to reclaim the village’s pride? Audiences: No thanks.

Silent Sky — Photo: Scott Suchman

The idea that Samuel Beckett’s plays are actually funny in performance is considerably more honored in theory than in practice. But happily, a rare pairing of his “Endgame” and the little-seen “Rough for Theatre II,” now playing at the Old Vic in London, bucks the trend.

When an ancient woman seeing out her last days in a trash can asserts that "nothing is funnier than unhappiness," it's impossible not to laugh. But then she, and playwright Samuel Beckett, quickly add a corrective: "We laugh with a will in the beginning.

It took a trio of MacArthur Fellows — composer Matthew Aucoin, playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Mary Zimmerman — to bring to the boards L.A. Opera's world premiere Eurydice, a vibrant and musically of-the-moment take on a tale that has been adapted to the medium roughly 70 times before.

Paul Mazursky's 1969 film comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a witty social satire about the sexual revolution and the confusion it engendered among a generation, was perfect for its era. Now there's a new musical adaptation, receiving its off-Broadway world premiere with The New Group and staged by the company's artistic director, Scott Elliott.

Pilgrims — Photo: Christopher Banks

Spring Awakening: Evan Daves — Photo: C. Stanley Photography

Merry Wives — Photo: Cameron Whitman

The Confession of Lily Dare fairly begs the question: Why stay home watching old films on Turner Classic Movies when you can see Charles Busch send them up in his gloriously campy, cross-dressing fashion? Returning to the parodistic style with which he made a name for himself in such comedies as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die! (the last two also made into movies), the actor-writer here delivers an amusingly loving send-up of the sort of melodramatic, pre-Code

By Tom Grater