Nearly 50 million Americans suffer from hearing loss, most of it related to aging and exposure to loud noise. For more than two decades Katherine Bouton has lived with hearing loss so severe that it forced her to quit her job as a New York Times editor. Although Shouting Won’t Help is sometimes overly technical and is stuffed with statistics, the book nevertheless provides an … [Read more...]
Archives for April 2013
Postcard from New York No. 8: ‘The Memory Show’
Most theatergoers recoiled when they heard that someone had written a musical about a woman with bipolar disorder, but Next to Normal won the Pulitzer Prize and ran almost two years on Broadway, spawning regional productions all over the country. Now the idea of such a show seems, well, almost normal. Still, are audiences ready for a musical about a woman facing the brick wall … [Read more...]
Sundays: The few, the proud, the Brooklynized
By Myles Ludwig A couple of weeks ago, T, the special magazine-like issue of The New York Times published an article about a growing trend they called the “globalization of Brooklyn” or “Brooklynization.” Theoretically, there could be a Brooklynized neighborhood in Beijing. The word, “Brooklynization,” reminds me of the corruption of the word “factoid,” invented by Norman … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 7: ‘Assembled Parties,’ ‘Pippin’
My time in New York is coming to a close, but fortunately I saw two first-rate shows today that have Tony Award written all over them. The likely winner for Best Play is The Assembled Parties by Richard Greenberg (previously best-known for Take Me Out), who stubbed his toe earlier this season with the short-lived new adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Assembled Parties, by … [Read more...]
Good Dvorak, Beethoven end Boca Symphonia season
The Boca Raton Symphonia closed its 2012-13 season Sunday with a too-little-heard major concerto and a genial reading of a major symphony, securing a solid planetary foothold amid the constellation of local chamber orchestras that appeared in the wake of the Florida Philharmonic’s Big Bang. Let by guest conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos, who directed the group last month at … [Read more...]
Gritty performances lift Arkansas swamp thriller
If anything can connect the ambitious young oeuvre of writer-director Jeff Nichols, it’s the sense of angst and dread permeating flyover country. The filmmaker behind Shotgun Stories, set amid a sibling feud in Arkansas, and the extraordinary Take Shelter, about a doomsday prepper in Ohio, Nichols is back in Arkansas for his third feature, Mud, an appropriate title for a grimy … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 26-28
Theater: OK, procrastinators, this is the final weekend to catch the first-rate Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, the great absurdist playwright’s comic meditation on death. In it, the king of a shabby, rundown realm learns that he has only 90 minutes left to live ― not coincidentally the lengths of this one-act play ― so he takes stock of his … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 6: ‘The Nance’
If Wednesday was a dessert day where all I had to do was watch two splashy musicals, Thursday I had to do actual work. I ran around the city doing four different interviews about shows coming to the Kravis Center next season. First it was downtown to talk to Hal Luftig, producer of the Evita revival that is on the Kravis on Broadway schedule next year, then back up to the … [Read more...]
‘Beau Jest’ delights at Broward Stage Door
By Dale King If you’re planning to see Beau Jest at the Broward Stage Door Theater, there are a few things worth knowing right off the bat. First, don’t confuse this show with Beau Geste, the 1924 adventure novel by P.C. Wren that has been adapted for the screen several times and also parodied on a few occasions. Second, if you see the name Michael Leeds listed as director, … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 5: ‘Matilda,’ ‘Kinky Boots’
Wednesday was a real dessert day at the theater ― two musicals, Matilda and Kinky Boots, widely expected to be competing against each other for the top Tony Award. Matilda arrives from London weighed down with Olivier Awards and is the front runner to win over here, but I think it could be a closer race than anticipated. Matilda is based on a Roald Dahl kid’s book about a … [Read more...]