Tag: Vol. 33 No. 31

Like its inspiration, Puccini’s La boheme, this Broadway hit is a counterculture soap opera whose simultaneously stereotypical and archetypal crises are made credible and immediate by rousing songs and unshakable optimism in the face of death and despair. The inventively arranged score–by Jonathan Larson, who died at 35 just days before the show’s 1996 premiere–is […]

MADtv–an LA clone of Saturday Night Live–epitomizes everything I hate about west coast-style sketch comedy. The often poorly written material depends way too much on funny wigs, awful clothes, and wild prosthetic devices: bad teeth, weird glasses. Worse, most MADtv sketches are not about regular people or situations but about celebrities or TV shows or […]

At the rehearsal I watched, artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar said she was “cleaning up” the company’s new work, Walking With Pearl, adjusting her dancers’ timing and spacing. The process was fascinating, like the unraveling and reweaving of a piece of cloth. Though Zollar attended to such details as flexed or pointed feet, she […]

For his video installation American Diorama Charles Woodman panned his camera across scenery in 17 places in Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and California. But the scenic content is secondary to the formal concerns, as is the incidental motion the camera records–a passing truck on a country road, Woodman’s fingers fiddling […]