Wrong Mountain Is Enjoyable, But Often Wrong

Written by Jonathan Kalb on February 1, 2000. Posted in Posts, Theater

Wrong Mountain By David Hirson By the time this goes to press, David Hirson’s Wrong Mountain, the only new nonmusical to open on Broadway this season, will already be under tremendous pressure to close. This is sad, not only because my expectations were extremely high for this second play by the author of the brave,
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Sexual Perversity in Chicago; The Duck Variations

Written by Jonathan Kalb on January 25, 2000. Posted in Posts, Theater

Sexual Perversity In Chicago & The Duck Variations By David Mamet Now, many people who know his 1974 play Sexual Perversity in Chicago–the work that first earned him wide attention, and the second production (along with The Duck Variations) of the Atlantic Theater Co.’s all-Mamet season–might well hear such a story and say, "It figures."
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Jackie Mason’s Backâeuro;”But Why?

Written by Jonathan Kalb on January 18, 2000. Posted in Posts, Theater

Much Ado About Everything by Jackie Mason Before Seinfeld, before Barbra went WASP in The Way We Were, your average armchair sociologist could posit two basic views of Jewish identity in America: one from New York City (and maybe Miami Beach) and one from everywhere else. Because New York was the only place in the
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Marie Christine; Amadeus

Written by Jonathan Kalb on January 11, 2000. Posted in Posts, Theater

Marie Christine By Michael John LaChiusa A great play, by contrast, is one whose cheating is earned, relevant to the action and necessary to the play’s eloquence–as when Euripides’ child-murderer Medea (conceived in 431 BC) escapes the scene of her crimes in a dragon-drawn chariot, offering not only a marvelous spectacle in itself but also
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Hamlet

Written by Jonathan Kalb on January 5, 2000. Posted in Posts, Theater

"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare," said Robert Graves, "is that he is really very good–in spite of all the people who say he is very good." Even Shakespeare has prestigious detractors, though, among them Tolstoy, who once wrote after seeing King Lear and Hamlet: "If I had any doubts at all about the justice of
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Mae West’s Sex

Written by Jonathan Kalb on December 28, 1999. Posted in Posts, Theater

Nearly everyone who has looked into the matter now agrees that the real reason for this raid wasn’t Sex, whose greatest provocation was that its prostitute-protagonist didn’t apologize, shrink away or die in the end, but rather West’s other play, The Drag, a raucous and equally unapologetic transvestite spectacle that homophobic officials were determined to
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Millennium’s Neighborhood

Written by Jonathan Kalb on December 24, 1999. Posted in Posts, Theater

My last month of the millennium began with a wonderful spectacle of civil disobedience, inaugurating a theatrical festival that got almost no preopening publicity but nevertheless deserves more attention than most of what passes for news in this city. Millennium’s Neighborhood (Not a Celebration of the Malling of New York) was the brainchild of the
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Dinner with Friends

Written by Jonathan Kalb on December 16, 1999. Posted in Posts, Theater

Admirably, Donald Margulies sees himself as part of this need. He has honesty and a Woody Allenish gift for observing the sad subtleties of language, humor, boredom and self-deception among today’s sated middle class. He’ll get where he’s going someday, I suspect. In the meantime, Dinner with Friends, which deals with two 10-years-plus marriages of
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Arthur Miller’s Moralizing

Written by Jonathan Kalb on December 7, 1999. Posted in Posts, Theater

I’ve always been grateful to this production, both for its own beauties and for introducing me at last to a Miller work that I could genuinely like. Miller’s major plays invariably move me, but after carrying me along on their carefully arranged emotional journeys, they just as inevitably let me down. As soon as my
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Ruskin’s Runaway Countess

Written by Mimi Kramer on December 7, 1999. Posted in Posts, Theater

The story it tells is one that most people have probably heard at one time in some form or another, whether they know it or not. It’s probably most readily available in Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose’s 1983 study of five idiosyncratic Victorian marriages. Briefly, Gray left Ruskin–more or less for the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett
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