Theater/Film Reviews
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Anonymous
Poor Wm. That’s Wm. short for William, Shakespeare, again under attack by some who say he could not have written the plays that have been under his name for 500 years or so. “Anonymous,” which opens here today, is the latest in a long line that has offered Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and many others
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The Women on the 6th Floor
Spanish housemaids in Paris are like Mexican farm workers in Texas. They’re overworked and underpaid, treated badly, kept on a lower social level in a permanent underclass. They’re “The Women on the Sixth Floor,” a pleasant little French comedy that opens here today. Set in 1962, it’s a feel-good piece that might have made its
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Martha Marcy May Marlene
Dividing four into one can be a difficult task. Dividing one into four is creates a problem for the one. Whichever way the division goes creates problems, and that's the key to "Martha Marcy May Marlene," which opens today. Elizabeth Olsen, sister to the more famous twins, is extremely effective in the title role of
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Billy Elliott
Musical theater has trite plots. But never mind. They can be great fun, as proven at the Fox last night when "Billy Elliott" came to town and danced up a mighty storm. Yes, there are exceptions to my thinking about plots, but they're few and far between, and besides, the show is too much fun
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Circle Mirror Transformation
Whether art imitates life, or it’s the other way around, the warp and woof of art and life make for fascinating patterns, experiences, even hopes and dreams. All surface during “Circle Mirror Transformation,” which opened the 2011-12 Rep Studio Theatre season over the weekend in the little theater in the basement of the Loretto-Hilton Center.
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The Kitchen
English playwrights in the 1950s and 60s wrote so many plays set in dingy homes and involving lower-middle class families that they began to be termed “kitchen sink drama.” Arnold Wesker’s drama, “The Kitchen,” is set in a restaurant kitchen but is so inflammatory it might be better called “kitchen stove drama.” The play, written
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Taking Shelter
Horror stories, especially when diverted to the movie screen, usually get boring rather soon, at least in my opinion. Every once in a while, however, someone breaks out of the old mold and we get something interesting, even fascinating. Such is the case with “Take Shelter,” where Jeff Nichols’ screenplay brings reality so close to
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Sholom Aleichem: Laughing in the Dark
Sholom Aleichem, who proved that Yiddish could be a language of literature as well as of the streets, made and lost many fortunes as a market investor in the days before insider trading. He created a character named Menachem Mendl who echoed his, and his father’s, roller-coaster financial lives, even as he later created Tevye,
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The Rum Diary
Johnny Depp obviously is a great fan of Hunter S. Thompson, who invented gonzo journalism with his series of "Fear and Loathing. . . ." reports for Rolling Stone. Depp portrayed the Thompson character, Raoul Duke, in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," met him during the filming. Later, Depp helped arrange for the publication
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Black Power Mixtape 1967-75
In 1967, a group of Swedish television journalists traveled to the U.S. to do a series of reports on a troubled society. They arrived here in the spring of 1968, when it sometimes seemed that our nation was falling apart. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were assassinated, cities were in flames,