After 33 years of writing about them, it’s difficult to find a new way to describe Garth Fagan Dance. Yet, though the dances are always definably Fagan’s, they are newly inventive. Fagan adds unique work every year. How difficult must it be to achieve that level of creativity? The performances are equally remarkable. Fagan’s […]
Arts & Entertainment
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What, get outta show biz?
In its fourth decade, Neil Simon’s quirky gag fest The Sunshine Boys works amazingly well. Considering those who have played it, I’ve always regarded the play as a showcase requiring master comic actors and comedians. But, though it is headed by one exceptional performance, the Jewish Community Center’s holiday revival of The Sunshine Boys is […]
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Narrating the visceral object
As the winter winds are set to billow across Lake Ontario, a wind of a different sort has already blown into Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It came in the form of a new director, Louis Grachos, who arrived this past January. Grachos has introduced several new initiatives calculated to reinvigorate the gallery, including a refocused […]
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‘Pyretown’ smolders and disturbs
There’s a lot of resonance in John Belluso’s title, Pyretown. The community he looks at is full of combustible elements that fuel not only personal dramas but also hot issues. Geva Theatre Center commissioned and developed this thoughtful, affecting play, and is now presenting its world premiere production with considerable fire. Belluso set his […]
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Collecting the marks of the modern
There aren’t too many terms that have the ability to disquiet the bourgeois while enlivening the avant-garde, but “modern” or “modernism” can do just that. To be a modern painter can imply both a commitment to formal innovation and a challenge to the status quo. In this way, modernism in art can range from […]
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A Danish physic
In his prize-winning play, Copenhagen, England’s popular comic playwright Michael Frayn (author of Noises Off) turned to physics to examine more literally earth-shaking matter and perhaps provide a cathartic examination of the most horrific human conflict. In fact, Frayn turned to history, and his “science-play” struggles mightily to arrive at a humanistic conclusion. Wordier than […]
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Time to grow up: RoCo comes of age
<pIn 1977 a new cultural institution, the Pyramid Arts Center, opened in Rochester. After 27 years, seven locations, and a name change to Rochester Contemporary (RoCo), its mission remains basically unchanged: to encourage the redefinition of contemporary art in Upstate New York. As the arts center prepared for its big re-opening on Friday, October […]
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Learning to speak Southern
When I taught a hilarious play, The Nerd, in a comedy course, several people told me that Larry Shue, who wrote only a few plays before dying young, wrote an even funnier farce called The Foreigner. Blackfriars Theatre is producing a rollicking version of The Foreigner that proves their point. Not as polished and […]
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A room of her own
We are quite often interested in artists who have exceptional lives. And if those lives involve scandal, intrigue, or illness, we become fascinated. This fascination manifests itself not only in the biographical, but in the work itself. We want to see the life illustrated in the work of these artists — Vincent Van Gogh […]
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Almost squeaky clean
Because it won prizes at Canadian fringe festivals, I expected Clean Irene and Dirty Maxineto be an edgy example of experimental, counterculture theater. In fact, it’s a cute, family entertainment. Anna Chatterton and Evalyn Parry, the talented two young women who created and play it, are likable and frisky. Except for their occasional, seemingly unmotivated […]
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A nostalgia revived
Geva seems committed to producing Neil Simon’s “BB” trilogy of autobiographical plays, starting this year with a splendid January production of Brighton Beach Memoirs and now topping that with a flawless Biloxi Bluesto open the fall season. Both cast Dennis Staroselsky as Simon’s alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome. I hope to see him next year […]
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Garth Fagan is building a mecca
Maybe you can come home again. In 1991, three acknowledged masters — choreographer Garth Fagan, musician Wynton Marsalis, and sculptor Martin Puryear — collaborated on an evening-long work, Griot New York. The premiere at Brooklyn Academy received rave reviews, as did the international performances. The artists’ schedules didn’t permit Fagan to bring the work […]
