This season’s Tony Award nominations were announced Tuesday morning, and the teeth-gnashing and head-scratching has begun. Because there are so many fewer eligible productions than there are, say, films vying for Oscar recognition, the snubs and surprise inclusions are much more remarkable. Typically, when stars from other media make the financial sacrifice of starring on … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 7-9
Film: There are so many major award-worthy movies playing now that a better-than-average film with a strong ensemble cast of box office names gets relegated to our digital art houses. I refer to A Late Quartet, a first feature from documentary maker Yaron Zilberman about an internationally known string quartet facing a threat to its survival when one of the group is diagnosed … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 21-22
Theater: GableStage and its artistic director Joe Adler have an affinity for the plays of David Mamet, so it was probably inevitable that he would bring to the area the wily wordsmith’s latest Broadway script, Race, which looks at three attorneys, two black and one white, offered a chance to defend a white man charged with a crime against a black woman. As the characters … [Read more...]
On Broadway: What to see, what not to see
From a whirlwind Broadway trip in which I saw 12 shows in eight days, here are my views on what to head to New York to see, what to look forward to catching on tour and what to avoid at all costs: THE PLAYS Other Desert Cities (A) ― The consistently intelligent Jon Robin Baitz (TV’s Brothers & Sisters) has often trod dysfunctional family territory, but rarely with as much … [Read more...]