newcritics

It was quite unexpected when my brother walked into rehearsal one night way back in 1979 and announced that “Steve Miller” had a new record out that blew him away. He told us the name of the song was Is She Really Going Out With Him, and that it rocked hard with great lyrics. Back [...]

His name is on a Broadway marquee again this month with a musical version of “The Catered Affair,” one of his lesser works, but having Paddy Chayevsky back in any form is good for our culture.
In the second half of the 20th century, he almost single-handedly invented TV drama, then went on to theater and [...]

Recently, I had a chance to see “Elizabeth Rex” performed at Nicu’s Spoon Theater in NYC, written by Timonthy Findley and directed by Joanne Zipay. The play’s principle motivation attempts to unravel the struggle universally experienced by men and women who seem to lack a [...]

[From the archives. Originally posted at my place January '07.]
Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly is a modern musical masterpiece. It is a quintessential concept album, never wavering from the theme of a teen-aged boy’s (and a maladroit jazz geek at that!) fantasies circa 1960. Part autobiographical, the album captures the essence of the late 50’s [...]

It’s usually a risk to see a Broadway show late into its run. For one thing, it’s tired; the performers have been doing 8 shows a week, over and over, and there’s bound to be a certain… lack of freshness. The buzz around even the most amazing show is bound to have slipped as [...]

HBO has made John Adams a lot less lovable than Tony Soprano and, despite all the critical tiptoeing around it, picked a poor time to demythologize the making of the American miracle.
In this week’s next-to-last installment, a sour, surly Adams slips out of a half-finished, half-furnished White House to board a crowded jitney and avoid [...]

For our anniversary, Manny and I saw the Classic Stage Company’s production of Chekov’s “The Seagull.” Like any time-honored masterpiece, the play overwhelmed me to the point where I hesitate to comment, since whatever I write will naturally be trite, silly, or as the characters often complain, “boring.”
That’s a major joke in the [...]

He had a voice made for roaring like a hero about to charge into battle against a thousand bloodthirsty tribal warriors so naturally in just about every movie he made screenwriters and directors couldn’t resist the temptation to give him as many roaring moments as they could cram into two hours or three.
His Moses roared.  [...]

I must admit it thrills me –as a Columbia University alum AND as a dweeby, over-educated white guy–to wake up in a world where Vampire Weekend is the IT indie rock band of the moment (making the cover of Spin on Internet hype and a fan circulated CD-R before the January release of its debut [...]

Given that I started this gig off of Joan’s 100th (or, more likely 103rd), I suppose one ought to consider Bette.
Edward Albee tells this wonderful story - and while it’s been everywhere, it’s somehow more meaningful that he told it to me, and only me, over dinner in a fast food restaurant on North Avenue [...]

He isn’t often mentioned in the same breath with great male heartthrobs such as Gary Cooper or his contemporaries Marlon Brando and Gregory Peck, but Charlton Heston was one of the most breathtakingly handsome men in the annals of American cinema. To get his first major role in a big-budget movie, all he had to [...]

Frankly, my cultural and style icons are largely women and gay men, and I just don’t have a lot to say about Charlton Heston; I think Heston was the right guy in the right place to take advantage of a need for larger than life presence onscreen… but largely he wasn’t especially brilliant, nor was [...]

“All About Eve is about adults, a diminishing breed in an America of perpetual, panicky adolescence.” James Wolcott’s recent sentence about Bette Davis’s crowning flick popped into my head when I heard of Charlton Heston’s passing.
Heston was the most grown-up, adult man of my cinematic youth. He didn’t have the artistry of Burt Lancaster, or [...]

James Wolcott’s right: “it’s wealth that’s required, not scrappy resilience.” So we won’t be reviewing Shine a Light here, because I haven’t yet seen it. In lieu of the requisite Scorcese-mauling, how about a brief Tattoo YouTube for a Friday night, a shambling mess of videos that just percolated up from the series of tubes.

Classic [...]

Pardon me, I’m new around here.
When Tom asked me if I would join in the cultural critical fray around here (based on this, mostly), I was… well, astonished; someone actually asking me to do the thing I’ve longed to do, for, like, ever. I grew up - literally - writing movie reviews (as [...]