SwiftBlog

Chains! Rattling! Everyone’s done it. You’re running late for a party, you meant to bring a gift, you spot a bottle at the store and you snatch it up. Only when you’re on the subway do you realize — Wait, this isn’t wine. (For those who have never encountered “wine product,” pour some Hawaiian Punch into a cup, threaten it with a grape, and voilà.) There’s a similar delay in the experience of A Christmas Carol on Broadway. [Read More]

Emily Bergl, Brian T. Lawton, Heidi Schreck, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Rachel McMullin, and Hamish Linklater in The Comedy of Errors. “Where’s the money?” is, by a full fathom, the least appreciated famous-line Shakespeare ever wrote. The proper Elizabethan pronunciation, of course, is “wheyah’s da money?”—at least, according to Daniel Sullivan, Dean of Popular Bardology at the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park’s go-to Great Communicator. His cheerfully populist guys-and-dolls-and-clones interpretation of The Comedy of Errors—a clockwork Plautine comedy that needs little interpretation and, for exactly that reason, is always in danger of getting way too much of it—isn’t smothered under trowelfuls of thoughtful dramaturgy. [Read More]

Midler in Hello, Dolly. The show curtain now in use at the Shubert Theatre, where the ecstatic revival of Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler opens tonight, may be the reddest red-red I’ve ever seen. The beaded gown and ostrich-feather headdress Midler wears descending the Harmonia Gardens stairs for the title number radiate the same insanely warm glow. True, the saturated colors of the production are technically the work of Santo Loquasto, who designed the sets and costumes, and Natasha Katz, who designed the lighting. [Read More]

Much Ado About Nothing is a slippery play for a director to try to locate in time. Written almost entirely in antic, comparatively relaxed prose and, in its own day, set in the present, the play — especially the “merry war” of wit between its protagonists, Beatrice and Benedick — still feels modern to our ears. At the same time, its plot is built on the creaky old question of a woman’s virginity. [Read More]

’Newsies,’ at the Nederlander. I’ve heard them called “gateway musicals”: Shows that invite in younger fans, kids under 70 who find themselves curious about this “musical theater” they’ve heard so much about. Quality and style can vary widely, but they tend to be more recent additions to the Broadway canon. (Golden-age classics and spring-semester mainstays don’t count: Gateway musicals must be tough to mount in high schools, because without the struggle, where’s the allure? [Read More]

From Passage at Soho Rep. Christopher Chen’s tense, fascinating Passage is a delicate walk through a field of landmines, not all of which remain unexploded. As the title implies, the play is a journey — not only across space, between hypothetical countries, but into the internal abyss: the shadowy subcutaneous expanse where imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown. It’s a play about the birth of ideas and their tenacious, dangerous progression, how we cling to them for both attack and defense, and if they can ever be separated from the bodies in which they reside. [Read More]

From Clever Little Lies, at the Westside Theatre. The voice of Marlo Thomas, so cavernously amplified it sounds as if it’s coming from a secret vault at an undisclosed location outside of Marlo Thomas, expertly sets up a joke: “If you had told Jane Austen that someday her epic masterpiece would be read by people on their telephone, she would’ve said, well — ”  “What’s a telephone?” cackles a woman behind me. [Read More]

Anna Chlumsky and Adam Pally in Cardinal. Greg Pierce’s new play Cardinal, now at Second Stage Theater under the direction of Kate Whoriskey, is a bit like its own central character, Lydia Lensky: Both are cute at the outset and probably mean well, despite cynical tendencies — but when you get down to it, both are pretty awful. Cardinal is part of a widespread, depressing trend in contemporary playwriting and, crucially, play-producing that might be called the Law and Order: SVU gambit: Stick to a tested formula — be it solving New York’s latest especially heinous sex crime, or crafting a basic, sitcomesque family drama or quirky romance or coming-of-age tale — then insert a hot-button issue. [Read More]

PART I: THE MUSEUM AS FAIRY TALE I ’ve spent much of my life in and in love with museums. When I was 10 years old, there was no mention of art in my home. But then my mother began driving me from the suburbs to the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she looked at art on her own for hours, leaving me to do the same. At the time, I liked being alone but hated museums. [Read More]

Lost in Translation was released ten years ago today, so it also marks ten years of people asking each other, “What do you think Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation?” It remains one of the biggest mysteries in recent film history, its secrecy enhanced by the fact that no one besides the actors knows for sure what Murray said as Bob. [Read More]