Carey Harrison’s play Magus offers a melange of people and times, jumping back and forth between the early twentieth century and the late sixteenth. Kafka, Shakespeare and Cervantes all meet in a vision conjured by the madness of Kafka’s sister Ottla, overseen by the multi-skilled consultant to Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, who invites the audience…
Category: theater
Review: Hamlet
I am eternally grateful for the NT Live broadcasts; they bring a little bit of the London theatre experience to the (currently) frozen north, which seems so far from the city of my heart. Thank you, Spectrum 8 for hosting the broadcasts, even if Monday night’s show seemed to have its share of technical difficulties,…
Review: A Disappearing Number and The Real Inspector Hound
The National Theatre live broadcast of A Disappearing Number proved to be a stunning experience. A heady mix of drama, math, physics, love, romance, ritual, music, classical Indian dance and rhythms — it sounds too complicated to work, but it does. In fact, it’s kind of magical. Put together by the theatre company Complicite, this…
Unexpected
Well, the most unexpected thing yesterday was the snow that fell after the weather report suggested no more than the possibility of some light rain. My first reaction was disbelief, then dismay as it continued to fall. We finally accumulated over an inch and a quarter. There’s something distressing about getting snow this early, though…
Publication: Sex and How to Get It
Drop by Polite Company magazine to see my humor piece, “Sex and How to Get It.” Worth a chuckle or two, I hope. Feel free to leave a comment or repost it to Twitter or Facebook. That’s how word of mouth spreads these days. Which reminds me: Kit Marlowe‘s The Big Splash can now be…
Review: Phèdre
Despite being exhausted by Albacon, I decided to head out to the Spectrum Monday night with my pals Ron and Peg because they were rebroadcasting Helen Mirren’s star turn in Ted Hughes’ translation of Racine’s Phèdre at the National Theatre in London. I was sighing from the get go: they had a new introduction from…
Review: The Social Network
Why not spend a couple of hours with really unpleasant people? No? Well, I did so you don’t have to do so. Yes, intrepid movie pal Peg and I headed over to the Spectrum, fortified by a good lunch at the Fountain. As many of you know, I am a happy user of “The Facebook”…
Shakespeare-a-Go-Go
I set off Sunday for a Shakespeare double-header with my theatre buddy, Ron, and got all the way to Massachusetts to fill up on cheap gas before I discovered that I had left my check card in the cash machine: D’oh! We got to Shakespeare & Co for the first order of the day: A…
Theatre Round-Up
I’ve been lucky enough to have some great theatre outings in the last few weeks, but I’ve been short on time to talk about them. I slipped off to Massachusetts to visit Shakespeare & Co and catch both The Comedy of Errors and Richard III. The former was in the Bernstein Theatre with the troupe…
The Scottish Play, the Russian Play and Lowe in Basingstoke
Ah, it’s always fun to hit the Globe; I had missed their Macbeth earlier, so was glad to have a chance to catch it before it ended. The staging was a bit more elaborate than the usual plain stage: there was a double ring with chains and drapery over the stage, and a kind of…