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Cyrano’s gotta alotta, uh, whaddaya call it? Panache!
The Minor Critics just finished their first full week of school. The Iconoclast, 6th grade, is figuring out his middle school–new space, new people, new color folders. The Romantic’s excitement about...
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Opera where no one dies: the Minor Critics debate the Great Works
Most years, Jonathan and I buy series tickets to the opera. Each spring, the big thick brochure from The Metropolitan Opera arrives with a thunk in the mail, heralding the productions of the coming...
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Opera so good you’d see it again
Anna Netrebko yukking it up in the new Met Opera production of L’Elisir d’Amore I recently posted a the whole story of how the whole family chose what we’re going to see this season at the Metropolitan...
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This complex apparatus inside a man
Ivanov is an early Chekhov play. Later on, he figured out how to make more careful use of dialogue and richer use of action–all that kind of stuff that makes great plays. In the meantime, he made a...
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A dark and stormy night in New York, at the opera
Hurricane Sandy derailed the Minor Critics for a little while (no school, no electricity for a week at home) and hit many of our fellow New Yorkers even harder. For a little escape from thinking about...
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Reason and love keep little company together
Let us be honest about the children and their minor critical views. They tend to extremes. They can be fierce and harsh and they know what they don’t like (sad endings, anything without a story line),...
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Happiness, so much happiness
Even as long-time fans of the Classic Stage Company, we swallowed hard when we received the subscriber’s notice that this year’s season included a musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Passion. None of us are...
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What’s with all the witches? More Macbeth
The growing Minor Critics (now nine and eleven years old) continue to surprise me with their renewable enthusiasms. I keep thinking that at some point they’re going to say what you as a reader might...
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And miles to go before we sleep
Jonathan and I are big fans of the composer Richard Wagner, but we recognize that this is a pretty specific taste. Even other opera fans don’t always like Wagner. His politics are abhorrent, he tried...
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Nurture 1, Nature 0
So, the plays of Bertolt Brecht. “Brechtian” is often shorthand for people onstage talking directly to you in the audience. And other things that remind you that you’re in a theater watching something...
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The Line’s the Thing
Every summer in New York, the Public Theater gives a nice gift to the city of free Shakespeare performances in Central Park. Demand dictates that you arrive at the park at least by daybreak to stake...
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Like a merriment
A year or so ago, a theater company we’d never heard of called The Shakespeare Forum put on an intense and almost interactive Hamlet in a little theater in the East Village. The play’s a tragedy, but...
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Romeo and Juliet, thou talks’t of nothing
Romeo and Juliet as interpreted by the Romantic I wouldn’t recommend Romeo and Juliet as your first Shakespeare play. Sure, it has all that beautiful talk. But by contemporary lights, it is even more...
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A Magic Lion Midsummer Flute King Dream
This autumn, those of us in New York who like taking in the occasional performance of a Shakespeare play noticed that there aren’t just a few notable productions around. There are bucketfuls. There...
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The Romantic as Gertrude, briefly: fifteen seconds of Hamlet
The New York Times recently offered a challenge to “high school and college students” to post Instagram videos of themselves–with an in-built time limit of fifteen seconds!–performing snippets of...
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The Iconoclast in cheeky gravedigger vignette
Alas, poor Yorick, your skull looks like a ceramic pot. The Iconoclast assays fifteen seconds of Maximum Hamlet, for the New York Times invitation to student actors to Instagram bits of the play.
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After the storm
Last Saturday, New York was hit by steady snow that dusted the city and then turned to hail and slush. We slipped and stumbled through the whipping winds and piling snow to seek solace and comfort...
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The seat’s the thing
The holidays in New York. No snow, but plenty of seasonal family pleasures with the kids: messily decorating cookies and overeating same; enjoying Handel’s Messiah sung by our church choir on...
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Brecht in the City
Generally, the word on Brecht (“Brechtian” even) is that in his plays, the actors talk directly to you and they do all sorts of things to remind you you’re in a theater. At least, that’s where you...
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What?! They’re DEAD?
What do the figments of our imagination do, when we’re not imagining them? What of minor characters in a famous play, who exist onstage primarily to move the action along, and who have no real chance...
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