Get ready for a terrific psychological thriller, a 2019 French film now in theaters: WHO YOU THINK I AM starring iconic French megastar Juliette Binoche. I have no idea who she is in real life, though I have interviewed her several times over several decades and countless films. I think she must be the hardest [...]
She had me at "I have returned and it begins!" The opening salvo of the Huntington production of HURRICANE DIANE couldn't be more spot-on. Not only is it the first production of the Huntington's 40th season, but the first inside any Boston theater since spring 2020 when the world as we knew it shut down. [...]
You gotta love a play whose opening line is "Where's the fennel?" and whose climax turns on a signature dish of scallops. This foodie/theater critic just ate it up. "SEARED" is the Gloucester Stage's third production outdoors at the Windhover Performing Arts Center, a collection of rustic cabins and a stage set under a canopy [...]
What could be more fitting for this summer's FREE annual Commonwealth Shakespeare production on the common, than THE TEMPEST? In a season of storms: climatic, pandemic, and politic, and their cross currents: moral ambiguity, familial friction, and racial strife, the brilliant John Douglas Thompson and company deliver a masterpiece of rough magic and earthy wisdom [...]
I have finally seen THE movie of the summer-- and perhaps the year: SUMMER OF SOUL (... Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). "The Roots" drummer turned filmmaker Questlove has excavated buried treasure and turned it into a divine revelation of a feature documentary. The Harlem Culture Festival took place on 6 nights, [...]
It's as snappy as a bunch of legos, and directed by the guy who gave us THE LEGO MOVIE, Chris McKay, here in his live-action directorial debut. But he hasn't quite figured out the connective tissue that holds human characters together, nor a live-action feature which is its own kind of organism. What we've got [...]
A critic's job is never done. I am always trying to learn more and deliver ever more nuanced reviews of the work I see. As a white critic, I am always trying to see beyond the lens of my whiteness. In reviewing IN THE HEIGHTS I didn't understand the lack of representation of Afro-Latino characters [...]
Seven years before the Pulitzer Prize-winning global phenomenon that is HAMILTON opened on Broadway in 2015 and blew the roof off staged musicals forever, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda's first Broadway musical the Tony Award-winning IN THE HEIGHTS opened in the same theater in 2008. Now, like "Hamilton," it's also a movie, a glorious movie more powerful [...]
This is the best virtual theater I've seen all pandemic: chekhovOS/an experimental game/. Conceived and directed by Arlekin Players Theatre founder and artistic director Igor Golyak, this production melds live and pre-taped theater, video, film, and gaming technology into a hybrid that unlocks a new way of understanding the world of Chekhov's plays, even as [...]
I've always had a weakness for villainesses. Sleeping Beauty was a snooze compared to the magnificent Maleficent. I adored Snow White; still her ravishing wicked queen of a stepmother was disturbingly alluring. Even that green-complected shrew on a broom who threatened Dorothy, the Wicked Witch of the West (the sheer power of that woman with [...]
