Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:02:45 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Eric Grode :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Eric+Grode istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/zombie-burrowing-into-an-unbeautiful-mind/84298/ Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The stage is one of the very few places where Joyce Carol Oates's reputation as a master stylist has suffered a few bruises. Not from lack of effort: The dizzyingly prolific Ms. Oates has written enough adaptations of her own fiction ("Black Water") as well as original works to fill a few anthologies. Still, for a woman whose name routinely surfaces during Nobel Prize speculation, Ms. Oates the playwright has typically met with responses ranging from tepid encouragement to benign neglect. Enter... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/parker-performer-and-peyote-at-the-fringe/84040/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Carol Lempert's "That Dorothy Parker" is a competently assembled, crisply produced, scrupulously sincere tribute to a major figure in American letters. What on earth is it doing at the New York International Fringe Festival? As countless theatergoers have learned, frequently to their detriment, the Fringe is generally a lot more comfortable with snickers than salutes. Its favorite son remains the Brecht-in-training-pants "Urinetown: The Musical," and other transfers have included "Debbie Does... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/sizzle-under-the-big-top-in-absinthe/83552/ Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For the last three Augusts, while much of Lower Manhattan succumbed to the ragtag and often risquι charms of the Fringe Festival, the dark-wood-and-glass big top known as the Spiegeltent has touched down from Belgium to offer a more refined flavor of decadence. "Absinthe," a Cirque du Soleil-meets-"Moulin Rouge"-meets-Weimar Berlin-meets-"Borat" hodgepodge of airborne eye candy and earthy humor, has given New Yorkers a reason to set foot on the South Street Seaport. In fact, the title of the... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/that-60s-show-hair/83426/ Fri, 8 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST 'The songs are just laundry lists." It's "one-third music" that "doesn't even belong on the same record player" as its contemporaries. Even the most cursory stroll through any Broadway chat room will unearth statements this damning and worse, and the level of dudgeon spikes dramatically when the show in question has a 4/4 beat. "Passing Strange" and "Spring Awakening" are just two of the recent rock musicals to send commenters into paroxysms of either ecstasy or rage. The above criticisms have... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-specimen-of-small-town-waspdom/83249/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST With the exception of "Love Letters" and its revolving door of big-name actors, A.R. Gurney has never relied too heavily on casting stars. In some three dozen finely etched plays written over a quarter century, the inhabitants of his chosen world — the teetering demi-aristocracy of Northeastern WASPs — have long resigned themselves to the fact that their brighter, glitzier days lie irretrievably in the past. Star wattage would only blot out the diminishing surroundings even further. This... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/animal-house/83164/ Tue, 5 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST If one's sole companionship in the space of two months is the Chinese takeout guy and the treasurer of American Origami, a few changes may be in order. The depressive master folder Ilana Andrews (Kellie Overbey) finds herself in this situation in Rajiv Joseph's dog-eared but nonetheless ingratiating "Animals Out of Paper." Mr. Joseph clearly has seen his share of romantic comedies as well as examples of the similarly oversaturated mutual-uplift-through-mentorship genre: His work, the second of... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/nameless-homeless-borderline-soulless-ralph/82507/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST One's musical preferences speak volumes about one's outlook on life. Beatles versus Stones, Copland versus Schonberg, Biggie versus Tupac, Rodgers and Hammerstein versus Rodgers and Hart: Each offers a digestible (if occasionally — and sometimes self-consciously — misleading) primer on the values and aspirations of the respondent. But what if the answer is "None of the above"? Such is the state of the nameless, homeless, and borderline soulless narrator of "First Love," the pungent 1945 Samuel... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-beckettian-sleeper-hit-at-lincoln-center/82242/ Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST "Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you." Those words from "Krapp's Last Tape," along with every other word that Samuel Beckett ever wrote for the stage, were heard at the Lincoln Center Festival in 1996, courtesy of Dublin's Gate Theatre. Once apparently wasn't enough, though, for festivalgoers, though, so the Gate has dug a little deeper into Beckett's archives and offered up some new misery — along with joy, bafflement, perversity, and general... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-mega-meta-micro-musical/82144/ Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST If you see only one mega-meta-micro-musical this year, make it "[title of show]." A defiantly insider and yet sneakily inclusive musical about two guys who write a musical about two guys who write a musical, "[tos]," as it's known, lovingly demolishes Broadway's most durable art form. In its place is a sweet, raunchy, and just about irresistible portrait of how and why we tell stories. Hunter Bell (the book writer) and Jeff Bowen (the composer/lyricist) gave themselves three weeks to put... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-strangerer-an-existential-crisis-in-coral/81954/ Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Amid the various tabloid flash points in the summer of 2006 — Mel Gibson's drunken tirade, Pluto's demotion to "dwarf planet" status, Zinedine Zidane's World Cup head butt — came news that Albert Camus was the subject of discussions in Crawford, Texas. President Bush's summer reading list, it was confirmed, included the 1942 existentialist classic "The Stranger," a radical departure from the Civil War histories, Greatest Generation biographies, and Tom Clancy thrillers that have traditionally... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/sam-shepards-horseplay/81868/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST 'Some dumb show — struggling with a dead horse, mumbling to yourself in front of a gaping hole you've spent a solid day digging, rambling on to imagined faceless souls." Sam Shepard can generally be counted on to mosey around a point, letting his symbolism-drenched dollops of Western-flavored Southern Gothic fill in the gaps as he goes. But when Hobart Strother blurts out this description of "Kicking a Dead Horse," Mr. Shepard's inert and occasionally inept exercise in Beckettian absurdism, he... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/baby-doom-christopher-durangs-the-marriage/81755/ Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The little bundles emerge from stage right, usually (but not always) in the arms of an obstetrician. Four are wrapped in blue blankets, one in pink. One is tossed in from offstage. All five land on the ground with an amplified thud. All but one is a corpse. Christopher Durang had broached the subject of dead babies before his 1985 pitch-black comedy "The Marriage of Bette and Boo," now receiving a potent if occasionally wobbly revival at the Roundabout. The title character of his "Sister Mary... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/alan-cummings-glammed-out-demi-god/81292/ Mon, 7 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The pairing is irresistible: Alan Cumming, who honed his ambisexual, Pied Piper stage persona through works such as "Cabaret" and "Design for Living," taking on the role of Dionysus, the pansexual god of wine and revelry. Dionysus is also commonly known as Bacchus, and the National Theatre of Scotland's uneven Lincoln Center Festival production of "The Bacchae" has added another pseudonym, one that the god himself gleefully announces — "the Scream." In harnessing Mr. Cumming's impish fervor to... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/above-and-beyond-a-three-ringed-affair/80798/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The "Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy" program lists the nationalities of each performer, with seven countries represented among the 28-member cast. That's four fewer than the number of languages included (with accompanying flags) on the promotional posters outside the theater. "Jungle Fantasy," created and directed by Neil Goldberg, is clearly designed to lure the foreign tourists who have of late been lured to wordless off-Broadway fare such as "Jump," "Stomp," and "Fuerzabruta." What will they... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/toil-and-trouble-in-the-tobacco-warehouse/80445/ Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST "There is no smoking anywhere in the Tobacco Warehouse." Not since President Merkin Muffley of "Dr. Strangelove" chastised two Cold War combatants for fighting in the war room has so ludicrous a decree been issued as this preshow announcement, currently on offer at this roofless, Civil War-era structure located in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. It promises a level of shrewd self-awareness that remains sadly unmatched in the lead-footed production of "Macbeth" that follows. Director Grzegorz... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-hamlet-with-bells-whistles-puppets/80190/ Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Hamlet enters the stage earlier than usual in Oskar Eustis's chock-a-block Shakespeare in the Park mounting. Clutching a beat-up valise and a single red rose, Michael Stuhlbarg's haunted prince sits in front of his father's grave and crumples, nearly paralyzed by grief. He remains in this position as the play's first scene — one of the few that does not require his presence — commences directly above him, atop David Korins's stone-and-metal set. Enjoy this bit of repose, Mr. Stuhlbarg. If this... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-a-baby-bump-does-more-than-rock-the-boat/79251/ Wed, 4 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Musical theater and evangelical Christianity have traditionally been uneasy bedfellows, as one recent "American Idol" contestant learned to her peril. (She sang a song from "Jesus Christ Superstar," with its mildly revisionist take on the Gospels, and was promptly given the hook by the voting public.) While composers are happy to send audiences out the door with a tambourine-shaking gospel number, they tend to shy away from the complexities of faith, let alone its more virulent manifestations... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/summer-stages/76758/ Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The faux-naive ethos of the era found perhaps its most enduring stage ambassador in 1971 with Stephen Schwartz's pop-pastiche pageant "Godspell," which ran for most of the decade. A Broadway revival has been tentatively slated for August. That makes it the first major revival of Mr. Schwartz's work since he wowed a new generation of youngsters with "Wicked," which had its premiere in 2003. Also due in August is "Hair," a show that had an even larger impact on the musical-theater landscape when... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/tales-from-the-sweet-side/76330/ Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The banged-up hardcover perched invitingly on the stage of "John Lithgow: Stories by Heart" is a prop, but one with a history. Called "Tellers of Tales," it's a much-perused anthology of short stories published in 1939. No less than W. Somerset Maugham edited its 100 stories, which ranged from Edgar Allan Poe to Balzac to Dorothy Parker to Faulkner, and it was "kind of a Lithgow family bible" to the itinerant, close-knit, unapologetically Anglophile family that included an impressionable boy... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/drumroll-please/76241/ Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Broadway has a reputation for clannishness, but a look at the last several years of Tony Award nominations paints a slightly different picture, at least as far as musicals are concerned. For the last seven years, the award for best original score (which includes lyrics) has gone to Broadway neophytes. Stephen Schwartz, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Kander-Ebb tandem, and Marvin Hamlisch are among the veterans who have come up short during that time. This year's nominations, which will be announced... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/top-marks-for-top-girls/76077/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Caryl Churchill's "Top Girls" has been parsed, plumbed, and pondered so thoroughly — it's probably on more college syllabi than any play written in the 30 years between "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Angels in America" — that it sort of hides in plain sight. Its opening act alone, a surreal dinner party made up of centuries' worth of famous women, might as well be known as the Scene That Launched a Thousand Theses. Well, put down your crib sheets and forget all that background (although... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/failing-to-let-the-good-times-roll/75943/ Wed, 7 May 2008 00:00:00 EST "Via Galactica." "Rockabye Hamlet." "Dude." These names ring any bells? There's no reason why they would, unless you're one of those obsessive collectors of flop-musical arcana, the sort of giddy masochists who cherish their "In My Life" and "Carrie" programs and who should be making a beeline for the tin-eared, thuddingly earnest "Glory Days." Those titles above were among the slew of rock musicals that opened on Broadway in the wake of 1968's "Hair," which threatened to completely upend the... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/friendly-funny-skies-of-broadways-boeing-boeing/75821/ Mon, 5 May 2008 00:00:00 EST When was the last time so much physical prowess and comic savvy were brought to bear on material as undeserving as "Boeing-Boeing," a dismal 1960s sex farce receiving a dynamite revival? Actually, come to think of it, it was just five months ago, with Mark Twain's "Is He Dead?" Just as director Michael Blakemore and a terrific cast led by Norbert Leo Butz managed to pull off that creaky cross-dressing affair (with a lot of help from David Ives, who heavily adapted Twain's original script)... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/despots-deathscape/75830/ Mon, 5 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Admit it: Who among us has not tried to alleviate boredom at some point by making funny voices or noises? When humming or whistling just won't do the job, when the laundry room or the long car ride or wherever requires a little extra company, sometimes only a little foolery will do, self-consciousness be damned. Now swap that extra-long spin cycle for eternity in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Those voices would get awfully animated, no? In Andrei Belgrader's respectable if occasionally overripe... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/wicked-games-watered-down-in-les-liaisons/75749/ Fri, 2 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Baudelaire, no stranger to scandal, was a huge fan of the novel "Les Liaisons Dangereuses." "If this book burns," he said of Choderlos de Laclos's epistolary pulse-racer of 1782, "it burns as only ice can burn." This sinuous tale of libertinism and sexual gamesmanship in late-18th-century France is certainly capable of raising one's body temperature a few notches, and the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Christopher Hampton's acclaimed 1985 adaptation continues the ornately decadent... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/charting-the-path-to-supreme/75657/ Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Nearly every historical monodrama pins its hopes upon its subject's oratorical gifts. These rousing and often transformative passages can come from the page (Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson), a seat of power (Golda Meir, Harry Truman), or even the stage (Paul Robeson, George Burns), but they typically assume the same role that hit songs do in an autobiographical musical revue: This, that, and the other thing happened to me, which led to ... this little number. After an illustrious judicial career... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/finding-reliable-success-in-the-unreliable/75577/ Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST The unreliable narrator has been simultaneously telling and dismantling tales at least as far back as Chaucer, but playwrights have been playing catch-up lately. Neil LaBute has turned the notion into a virtual cottage industry — one of his protagonists even describes himself as such. Aaron Sorkin featured a pair of them fact-checking each other in "The Farnsworth Invention," and David Hare described his interest in adapting "The Year of Magical Thinking" for the stage by explaining, "Whenever... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/morgan-freeman-is-back-on-broadway-in-the-country/75400/ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST It's been a while since this fellow has graced a Broadway stage. Everyone likes the guy — he's personable and sage, with an ever-present twinkle in his eye. Still, as opening night draws nearer, the cast and crew have grown visibly nervous about whether he still has it in him to carry the play. If you've seen or heard much about the current Broadway revival of the 1950 Clifford Odets sudser "The Country Wife," renamed "The Country Girl," you may well assume that this description pertains to... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/john-waterss-cry-baby-on-broadway/75361/ Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Complaining about tackiness in "Cry-Baby" is like begrudging "Avenue Q" its puppets or bellyaching that "Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps" is suspenseful. Giddy, low-frills subversion sits at the squirmy core of John Waters's oeuvre, and few things would be in as poor taste as a tasteful adaptation of any film by the self-described "trash auteur." Mediocrity, however, is another matter, one that no amount of whiz-bang choreography or wily supporting performances can mask. Among those having a go... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/too-grown-up-for-its-own-good/74968/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "A Catered Affair" is a Broadway musical created by, for, and about grown-ups. This alone puts it in somewhat rare company these days, coming near the end of a theater season that has already featured a mermaid in roller skates, a disco-creating goddess in roller skates, and not one but two tap-dancing green beasties (Frankenstein's monster and the Grinch). Composer-lyricist John Bucchino, book-writer Harvey Fierstein (who has written a ripe supporting role for himself), and director John Doyle... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/out-camping-oscar-wilde/74686/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "'Will and Grace' — I loved that show; it was adorable. It was like if Pottery Barn sold people." "What is that aroma, kitty litter and patchouli? Is that some new Glade spray, Country Fresh Lesbian? Jodie Foster No. 5?" "Can gay people change? Of course — for dinner." Roll over, Oscar Wilde, and tell Quentin Crisp the news. With "The New Century," Paul Rudnick has once again swollen the master list of memorable bons mots by a few dozen. The trick for anyone reviewing Mr. Rudnick's work is... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/shining-a-light-on-apartheid/74459/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST A 92-year-old man sits in a photography studio in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, surrounded by some two dozen relatives. The photographer, an irresistibly upbeat raconteur named Styles, marvels at the old man's wizened face: "Looking at it was like paging the volume of his history, written by himself," he recalls. Two days later, the man dies, commemorated by those relatives but also by the photographic reminder that was assembled just in time. This scene was written collaboratively in 1972 by... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/flimsy-feud/74238/ Mon, 7 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Two lovers enmeshed in family feuds, promised to others, doomed to feign suicides that become all too real: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra have often been likened to a grown-up version of Romeo and Juliet. But the churlish duo in Theatre for a New Audience's overemphatic revival, played by stage fixture Laila Robins and a strapping New Zealander named Marton Csokas, all but negates this comparison. Given Mark Antony's vainglory and Cleopatra's artifice-drenched histrionics in Darko... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/splendid-new-south-pacific/74172/ Fri, 4 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST More than the golden-hazed meadows of Oklahoma, more than the all-too-alive hills of Austria, more than even the gilded palaces of Siam, the equatorial islands immortalized by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II in "South Pacific" pulse with beguiling — and potentially destabilizing — allure. Death may hover on the periphery: The Pulitzer Prize-winning musical is, after all, set during World War II, which had ended just four years before its 1949 premiere. But the James Michener short... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/rose-past-her-peak/73831/ Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST What happened? How does a musical move into a theater more than 1,000 seats smaller and get broader in its delivery? How does a director who worked on the original production of a classic, who literally wrote the book on it, allow scene after scene to collapse into mood-shattering mayhem on his watch? How does a glorified summer-stock presentation emerge with the energy and discipline of a Broadway hit, and the resulting Broadway transfer meander with the diffuse, undermotivated energy of... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/brides-to-be-on-a-bar-crawl/73725/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Surely you've been in an improbably heartfelt conversation with someone who's had too much to drink. Their arm or neck or knee begins to sag mid-sentence, as if the effort to maintain the posture of sobriety proves too daunting, and they try to mask it by modifying the sodden dip into an oddly timed bit of body language: an abrupt scratch of the head, say, or maybe a small and oddly graceful dance step. A similar rubber-limbed delicacy hovers over Adam Bock's "The Drunken City," in which all... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/spring-guide/transfer-credits/73180/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST A 30-year-old actor named Patrick Stewart first came to Broadway via the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in Peter Brook's triumphant rethinking of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." History has repeated itself 37 years later, with Mr. Stewart again launching from BAM into another Broadway revival of another radical rethinking of the Bard; this time it's Rupert Goold's grisly take on "Macbeth," which reopens April 8 at the Lyceum Theatre. If tickets are as hard to get as they were at BAM — or even if they... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/hideous-dream-turned-tortuous-reality/72802/ Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST In "Conversations in Tusculum," Richard Nelson's deceptively well-mannered prequel to "Julius Caesar," the sleepy rhythms of the titular hillside town lend themselves to hours of fishing and lounging and talking. Especially talking: Rarely has a play's title been so accurate. Barely masked by the spirited debate, however, is the faint sound of the dogs of war straining at their chains. By the end of Mr. Nelson's mildly pedantic but nonetheless engrossing history play, havoc will be cried. Until... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/upper-upper-west-side-story/72594/ Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST If Lin-Manuel Miranda had grown up in a yurt deep in Uzbekistan, I am confident that he could have sold investors on a Broadway musical called "In the Steppes." Had he spent his youth in the Netherlands, audiences might today be tapping their toes to a swivel-hipped paean to international tribunals called "In the Hague." But Mr. Miranda grew up in the heavily Puerto Rican and Dominican region of Upper Manhattan known as Washington Heights. And so we have "In the Heights," a padded... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/curiosity-killed-this-cat/72537/ Fri, 7 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST First things first: Debbie Allen's all-black production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" deserves to be remembered for many things, some of them good and several of them bad. But it is not, as many have stated, an example of color-blind casting. If Phylicia Rashad were playing the wife of Ned Beatty rather than James Earl Jones, with Jessica Alba and Daniel Dae Kim smoldering away as Maggie and Brick instead of Anika Noni Rose and Terrence Howard, that would be color-blind casting. This is... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/demolition-project/72429/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The first thing we see in Jez Butterworth's quietly enveloping "Parlour Song" is a series of imploding buildings. This video footage, projected on the rear wall of the stage, is a sort of highlights reel that the demolitions expert Ned (Chris Bauer) is sharing with Dale (Jonathan Cake), his genial next-door neighbor and the play's narrator. Dale, who owns a handful of car washes, voices intense jealousy of Ned's job: "Do you have a big plunger? You do, don't you? ... You do. I knew it. I wash... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/no-life-at-the-end-of-this-line/72355/ Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Depending on who you ask, Sarah Ruhl has been either buoyed or hindered by directors with a taste for visual trickery. In the playwright's previous New York productions, "The Clean House" and "Eurydice," Bill Rauch and Les Waters saw to it that her surreal, unabashedly sentimental works were plastered with string houses, satanic tricyclists, and indoor hailstorms of half-eaten apples. This blend of cerebral showmanship, of swinging for the fences both visually and emotionally, has won the... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/portrait-of-a-screwup/72107/ Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Stew, the narrator and co-creator of the largely autobiographical and almost illicitly entertaining musical "Passing Strange," is not much of an actor, and he doesn't really claim to be. He's more of an indie-soul Puck, planting himself in the middle of the stage and observing his younger self's obsessive stumblings toward "the Real" with deadpan bemusement. Best known as the stocky, goateed leader of the rock band the Negro Problem, Stew (born Mark Stewart) has expanded his scope with this... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/71863/ Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Pastiche — the conscious echoing of music from a bygone era — trades on what audience members already know and how that knowledge makes them feel. In lesser hands, it can be a crutch, a pandering attempt to offer up a newly minted oldie-but-goodie. But when used with an eye toward both meeting and upending our assumptions, as in Michael John LaChiusa's "Hello Again" and, most famously, Stephen Sondheim's "Follies" and "Assassins," pastiche can make sense of today by spotlighting brand-new... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/tableau-vivant/71679/ Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Has any artist ever encapsulated both the exhilaration and the loneliness of creation as succinctly and sublimely as Stephen Sondheim did in "Finishing the Hat," from his and James Lapine's problematic 1985 masterpiece "Sunday in the Park With George"? Here's Georges Seurat as he defends, exults in, and very possibly regrets an obsession with his painting that has driven away his model and lover: Mapping out a sky, What you feel like, planning a sky, What you feel when voices that come Through... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/seurats-tableau-goes-high-tech/71666/ Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:58:06 EST Has any artist ever encapsulated both the exhilaration and the loneliness of creation as succinctly and sublimely as Stephen Sondheim did in "Finishing the Hat," from his and James Lapine's problematic 1985 masterpiece "Sunday in the Park With George"? Here's Georges Seurat as he defends, exults in, and very possibly regrets an obsession with his painting that has driven away his model and lover: Mapping out a sky, What you feel like, planning a sky, What you feel when voices that come Through... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/mutually-abusive/71465/ Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST About midway through "Unconditional," an agitated lowlife shares the stage with a dead confederate and the dead guy's girlfriend. For motivations that range from intimidation to an unsubtle attempt at closure, he grabs the young woman by the scruff of her neck and shoves her face into the corpse. The action — literally in your face — feels appropriate for Brett C. Leonard's tantalizing but ultimately unfulfilling intensity-fest now bellowing its way through a brief run at the Public under the... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/toil-trouble-trophy-wife/71358/ Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST The milk of human kindness, always a rare commodity in Shakespeare's spare but unsparing "Macbeth," is nowhere to be found in the scorched-earth production on grisly display at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Set amid the depravity of Stalinist Russia and firmly anchored by a wrathful Patrick Stewart, director Rupert Goold's daring and diabolical mounting turns all of Scotland into a virtual abattoir, peopled with little more than a pile of corpses that an ever-dwindling coterie of survivors... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/globalization-by-way-of-graphic-novel/71196/ Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST First let's get a few questions out of the way regarding "The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island: Or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower." No, the slugs being borne aren't slimy gastropods, but rather tiny ingots of lead. No, it's not entirely clear where Kayrol Island is, but it's somewhere in the vicinity of Borneo and it's mildly sinister. And no, the cracked musical collaboration of the indie-rocker Mark Mulcahy and the retro-visionary cartoonist Ben Katchor isn't nearly as precious or twee as that... ERIC GRODE http://www.nysun.com/arts/re-examining-morality-on-the-middle-passage/71068/ Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Very few hands escape the bloody taint of slavery in "Oroonoko." Unsurprisingly, the English slave traders and overseers come in for abuse in Aphra Behn's pioneering 1688 novel, which begins in West Africa and ends in the Caribbean colony of Surinam. But even these enslaved Africans, despite being presented by Behn as paragons of honor and nobility, had routinely sold their own prisoners of war to these same Englishmen. The Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele has revamped "Oroonoko" to an almost...