Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt introduced me to 38 characters I recognized instantly. Every person on stage was familiar in their talk, their thoughts, their walk, their actions. This is Stoppard’s coming-to-terms with the discovery late in life that his mother and he were Jewish. Upon arriving in England from Vienna in the late 1930s his mother …
After a full and musically satisfying Friday at the Newport Folk Festival with the family last weekend, the heat got to me Saturday morning while waiting to get back in for Day 2. The medics on-site determined it was dehydration and did a work up in their M*A*S*H tent. (“You’ve seen M*A*S*H, right? You have …
“Cousin Ira!” boomed the voice at the other end of the phone line. It was always Paul Bloch, James Caan’s publicist. I’d known Paul, the head of the music department at the PR firm Rogers & Cowan roughly since I was 18 when I started contributing music reviews to the Village Voice, Sunday New York …
NEW YORK, NY; March 24, 2022—Shaina Taub’s passion and earnestness are brilliantly exhilarating and exhausting in the musical Suffs at the Public Theater, continuously from the opening number straight through the following 2-3/4 hours. A sung-through musical about the suffrage movement and passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Taub is …
Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster’s names spill off the marquee at the Winter Garden Theatre; you have to be across the street to see the half-block-long billboard above the marquee that announces the show Jackman and Foster are in. However, the real star of this incredibly happy-making production of “The Music Man” is The Ensemble. …
I always told people I wanted to grow up to be Pete Seeger. That was a lie. I wanted to be Chad Mitchell. Chad had a great tenor that rode over the often acerbic and histrionic harmonies that were the Chad Mitchell Trio’s signature on Woody Guthrie’s “Great Historical Bum” and Michael Brown’s takedown of …
We are so overwhelmed by these past weeks, months, this year that sometimes masquerades as a decade. We have gone to sleep fretting over every cough or sneeze, to the sound of helicopters circling, protesters chanting, sirens whirring. We keep our contact with the outside world to a minimum, masks on and at a distance. …
BROOKLYN, NY; March 6, 2020—Riva is probably right — she usually is: No one would dare cough or sneeze in a theater right now. You’d be stared down and tsk-tsk’ed right up the coronavirus-disinfected aisle. But it’s a tense, respectful, hold-in-your-stomach quiet we’ve experienced in theaters the last few weeks, the kind of quiet that …
BROOKLYN, NY; Feb.26, 2020—I can’t tell you what a joy it was — and continues to be days later — to have hosted Christine Lavin performing a house concert in our home last Saturday night. We’ve had professional jazz musicians play in the past, typically as background for parties. And a young classical pianist played …
BROOKLYN, NY; FEBRUARY 14, 2020—Will you experience magic too if you attend one of the two remaining performances of the Brahams Violin Concerto in D Major by violinist Janine Jansen tomorrow (2/15) or Tuesday (2/18) with the NY Philharmonic under conductor Jaap van Zweden? And what is magic? When does it happen? I’ve been attending …
nightmayer 