SwiftBlog

Steve Toussaint and Hattie Morahan in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, at BAM. In 1982, I was a lowly intern on an ambitious Hal Prince musical called A Doll’s Life. With a book by (of all people) Betty Comden and Adolph Green, it was a very dark look at what might have happened to Ibsen’s Nora Helmer in the months after she infamously slammed the door on her husband and children in A Doll’s House — and what might have happened to womanhood in general in the hundred years since. [Read More]

Between Riverside and Crazy, now at Second Stage. Note: Between Riverside and Crazy, which Jesse Green reviewed during its run in August at the Atlantic Theater Company, reopens this evening at Second Stage. The cast remains the same, with one change: Ron Cephas Jones is now in the role of Junior, formerly played by Ray Anthony Thomas. It will run through March 22.  Even on the rare occasions when they’re legible, the notes I take in the theater are generally useless — except in those cases where boredom causes them to mutate into to-do lists. [Read More]

From ‘Continuity,’ at MTC Stage II. “You can blame it on continuity,” says a harried movie director into a walkie-talkie, giving the crew a reason not to let the diva leading actress change her hair. Bess Wohl’s smart, funny, and deeply sad new eco-drama is, its subtitle tells us, “A play in six takes”: It’s the story of a film crew desperately trying to get the shot before they lose the light. [Read More]

The Big Knife, at the American Airlines Theatre. “Angel,” “Child,” “Little Chum,” “Toots,” “Bozo,” “Handsome,” “Husband Dear,” “Sweet,” “Lady Pry,” “Monkey,” “Boy Friend,” “Lovey,” “Dimples,” “Tiger,” “Chickie,” “Beau Heart”: The rococo endearments just don’t stop in Clifford Odets’s 1949 play The Big Knife. They are, as one of its movie types might say, as plentiful and overripe as the fruit rotting outside in the Hollywood heat. So is the dialogue. [Read More]

Condola Rashad in Saint Joan. What is it that keeps artists coming back to the story of Joan of Arc, and why do they keep making a royal mess of it? The material is certainly captivating: Lone young woman — champion of faith and courage, victorious in battle and glorious in martyrdom — faces down the establishment, saves her country, dies bravely and achieves immortality by an age where a lot of us are sleeping through 9 a. [Read More]

Into Broadway’s bleak midwinter comes a bright orange ray of summer nonsense: Lysistrata Jones — an agreeable, disposable, Off Broadway musical goof on Aristophanes by the creators of Xanadu — has been carted uptown from the Gym at Judson and deposited in the Walter Kerr. Weightless, harmless, wittily witless, and surprisingly sexless (for a show about women holding out on their menfolk, this time in a college-basketball milieu), the show transforms an ancient Greek sex comedy into a modern American abstinence skit, stripping away generations of antiwar or proto-feminist interpretations and replacing them with indifferent yo-go girls. [Read More]

Sarah Woodward (Mistress Ford) and Christopher Benjamin (Sir John Falstaff) Loving theater is, without a doubt, an unhealthy relationship. Half the time you’re expecting too much of it; the other half, you’re making excuses for its shortcomings. But every once in awhile, a show comes along to remind you what theater actually is, in its purest form, and why it’s still worth switching off all electronic devices and squeezing into seats seemingly designed for hobbit yogis, all just to watch actors performing live on stage. [Read More]

“To this day, I believe that Betty believes it was either her or them.” Amanda Peet as Betty Broderick. Photo: Isabella Vosmikova/USA Network Amanda Peet as Betty Broderick. Toward the end of the true-crime series Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, Dan Broderick addresses law school students with a question: “What happens when two people perceive the same thing differently?” The prominent San Diego medical malpractice attorney is teaching the students how a client’s perception of an event is their truth, and that version of the truth is all a lawyer needs to build a story in court. [Read More]

With One Direction taking some time apart for an indefinite amount of time, the band’s members have been pursuing their respective solo projects, with Louis Tomlinson gearing up to release an album via his own record label later this year. (He also released his first song, “Just Hold On,” in late 2016 following his mother’s death.) But in a candid profile in The Guardian, Tomlinson opened up about the variety of insecurities he faced throughout his tenure in the boy band, most notably that he was seen by some as “forgettable, to a certain degree” and he never quite knew where he fit in. [Read More]

ANTIBOOKCLUB releases one title of literary fiction or nonfiction each year. See all 59 Reasons In the last few decades, the dozens of companies that once made up America’s publishing industry — Viking and Doubleday, Anchor and Crown, Dutton and Ballantine, and the rest — have grouped into just five multi-billion-dollar conglomerates, sharing offices at a few towers within a six-mile stretch of Manhattan. But that’s also freed up space at the other end of the spectrum, as scores of tiny independent publishers have arisen to fill the vacuum: from Dalkey Archive Press, which specializes in translated and postmodern literary fiction, to Verso, the predominant publisher of America’s political left, to poetry presses like Bloodaxe Books. [Read More]