'The Visit, or The Old Lady Comes to Call': Theater Review

No disrespect to Bob Dylan, one of the greatest songwriters in modern American music, but hearing his tunes sung by the melodious voices in Girl From the North Country is a revelation — the second time even more than the first. Moving to Broadway after a hit 2018 run at the Public Theater, this brilliantly conceived project from Irish writer-director Conor McPherson could be called the anti-jukebox musical.

Some people think Bob Dylan’s music is depressing — and in “Girl From the North Country,” Conor McPherson makes the case by setting more than twenty of Dylan’s songs into a surprisingly sturdy narrative about the residents of a seedy boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota, at the height of the Depression in 1934.

Suddenly Last Summer — Photo: DJ Corey

The Bitter Earth — Photo: Manaf Azzam

There’s a lot of tsuris in Richard Greenberg’s witty and quite wonderful “The Perplexed,” — at least for the older generation of characters on this 10-actor cast. In this new play now making its bow at Manhattan Theatre Club, they’re struggling madly with changing times they can’t fathom, family wounds that won’t heal and a posh wedding that no one particularly wants — except perhaps for the off-stage, wicked, ancient billionaire whose palatial home is the setting for the event.

The cast of Timon of Athens — Photo by Henry Grossman

Amen Corner — Photo: Scott Suchman

The Wanderers: Theatre J — Photo: Teresa Castracane

Shipwreck — Photo: Teresa Castracane

Clearly inspired less by the Book of Exodus than the Playbook of Disney, DreamWorks' screen-to-stage adaptation of the 1998 animated feature The Prince of Egypt is a frenetic, spectacle-driven show, massive in scale but lacking in charm.

When the sinisterly charming emcee played by Francis Jue clicks through black and white slides of the Khmer Rouge period near the start of Cambodian Rock Band, he rolls his eyes at the automatic associations most people have with the Southeast Asian country. "Bor-ring," he groans.

Better Call Saul is TV's best Rube Goldberg machine. The AMC drama has spent four-going-on-five seasons building an elaborate system of cause and effect, trapping people in such an intricate chain of consequences that, in some cases, they were living totally different lives when the first domino fell.

Better Call Saul is TV's best Rube Goldberg machine. The AMC drama has spent four-going-on-five seasons building an elaborate system of cause and effect, trapping people in such an intricate chain of consequences that, in some cases, they were living totally different lives when the first domino fell.

It says something about the supreme power of flesh-and-blood people portraying raw human feeling onstage, without the filter of another medium, that the most emotionally devastating and visually stunning moment in the radical new Broadway revival of West Side Story occurs when its extensive video elements are stripped away.

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

Kandi Burruss is speaking out for the first time following a shooting that left three people injured at her restaurant, Old Lady Gang, located just outside of Atlanta. According to police, a man opened fire in the Southern eatery on February 14, targeting one man and also wounding two bystanders. All three victims are expected to recover from the non-life-threatening injuries.