The first minute of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre’s One Green Bottle, running at La MaMa through 8 March, is already well worth the ticket price. Where else in the States can one see Japanese noh performed (albeit briefly), complete with kimono, fan, wooden bridge, and black-robed musician? Kneeling with zen-like calm amid an embarrassment of musical […]
Author: Sebastian Middlesex
Pinter à l’américaine: A review of “The Dumb Waiter”
Precision is a quality we expect of detectives and surgeons, not playwrights. Yet it’s precisely what makes Pinter’s plays so unnerving. The pregnant pauses like labor pains at the birth of some monstrous crime. The forensic insistence on minute detail, right down to the crumbs of an Eccles cake. As if each crumb were evidence […]
An Ear to the Celestial Vault in “The Listening Room”
One of the pleasures of attending fringe theatre is discovering unexpected troves of art tucked away in underground spaces. A prime example is The New Ohio Theatre, which, to judge by the imposing vault door, once concealed wealth of a more mundane character.
Theatrical Investigations: A Review of ‘Ludwig and Bertie’
‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ A famously pregnant quote that, like much of Wittgenstein, defies easy interpretation, idiomatic translation. Though perhaps it could best be rendered as a variation on the old parental saw: ‘If you can’t say anything meaningful, don’t say anything at all.’ I mention it not only because […]
Behind the Looking Glass: A Review of ‘A Strange Loop’
…but the musical numbers are so expansive, inventive, subversive, so side-splittingly funny that one quickly catches one’s breath. This is, after all, a musical, and as a musical, Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop triumphs. The audience leaps to its feet as Larry Owens’s Usher fittingly ends the endlessly self-referential play with its title, popping […]
A Modest Proposal, or Why I Did Not Attend the Hollywood Fringe Festival
The first thing that struck me on my virgin tour of Los Angeles last October was the homeless problem. On a cab ride from LAX to DTLA (that’s LA International Airport and Downtown Los Angeles for those of you unused to the Yanks’ fondness for acronyms), I counted no fewer than seventy-three tents, most of […]