Onstage at the Public, Tiny Beautiful Things. In the spirit of “Dear Sugar,” an honest confession: Up till now, I’ve steered clear of the work of Cheryl Strayed. I’m skeptical of Passion Planners, and I make a sharp turn in Barnes & Noble when I encounter the table displaying Eat, Pray, Love and The Desire Map. Really, it’s not the authors of these books I’m avoiding — it’s the warm, fuzzy cult of #selfcare that tends to cocoon around them.
James Thiérrée — grandson of Chaplin, great-grandson of Eugene O’Neill — in Raoul. The wind bites shrewdly, the mercury dips, and the circus has quietly slipped into town, in the form of two uniquely spooky shows, one haunted, one haunting, both centered on a single, singular performer — and both extrapolated from carny DNA. And let’s just skip the tiresome “but is it theater?” debate, shall we? We’re not big on litmus tests over here at Stage Dive.
From Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet. Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet begins casually and ends by breaking your heart. The latest from the adventurously lo-fi theater troupe Bedlam — which has earned a reputation for joyfully reinvigorating classic texts, from Hamlet and St. Joan to Sense & Sensibility and Peter Pan — is a new kind of experiment for the company. It’s a riff on two plays at once, Shakespeare’s youthful romantic tragedy and Chekhov’s mature and moody comedy, that uses the former like an emotional lever to pry the latter wide open.
Out of the coral-colored protoplasm of the past, Michael Mayer has raised up a weird chimera: His “reincarnation” of the 1965 oddity On a Clear Day You Can See Forever may be more platypus than unicorn, but for a platypus, it’s surprisingly light on its webbed flipper-feet. This new Day has flaws and foibles of its own, but it’s far more elegant than the original show and a valid (if more than slightly cockeyed) entertainment on its own weird merits.
From Admissions, at Lincoln Center. The world’s most fashionable astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, recently tweeted, “Creativity that satisfies & affirms your world view is Entertainment. Creativity that challenges & disrupts your world view is Art.” Despite a fair number of comments that point out how (a) simplistic, (b) clichéd, and (c) generally silly this sentiment is, at the moment of my writing it’s garnered almost 65,000 likes and over 21,000 retweets.
It’s oh-so-easy to hate Zach Braff, semiretired “It” kid, Scrubs’ erstwhile Ally McBoy, and now playwright: His first (and, I suspect, last) work for the stage, All New People, opened last night at Second Stage. It’s pretty bad, no way around it. But its badness needs examining; there’s anthropological if not artistic value here.
ANP sits, inevitably, in the shadow of Braff’s most indelible work. His Garden State made a hubristically deliberate bid to be The Graduate for the Exhausted Aughts — and it did, in fact, crystallize the profound self-absorption of mope-is-me Bush-age late-twentysomethings.
there are no small parts only small actors July 5, 2017 Fair Warning: Zendaya Is Barely in Spider-Man: HomecomingStill, the former Disney star is an utter delight in the limited time she spends onscreen. By Kyle Buchanan
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Where’s Waldo? Where’s Waldo? is set to become Where’s Waldo?: The Movie, which is to the delight of no one in particular but arrives to the general consensus of “Huh, I guess? I’m surprised that didn’t happen a long time ago.” Waldo, known originally as Wally in his native England, is the star of seven books that have sold 55 million copies, and a pretty easy and still surprisingly pervasive Halloween costume.
Update, March 18 at 11:30 a.m.: Donald Fagen, that funky one, has denied Aimee Mann’s claims she was dropped from Steely Dan’s upcoming tour because she’s a woman. “Well, first of all, the idea that I would make any decision based on the gender of a performer is ridiculous. That’s something that would never even occur to me,” he told Rolling Stone in a statement, citing a “communication problem” for the dates she was scheduled to open for the Dan.
Maybe Hollywood can’t quit Indiana Jones because the magic of his first adventure still hasn’t been recaptured. Not by a long shot. Every few weeks, Vulture will choose a film to watch with readers as part of our Wednesday Night Movie Club. This week’s selection comes from writer and critic A.A. Dowd, who will begin his screening of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark on July 5 at 7 p.