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    What’s Playing in Dallas? With Streaming, I Could Find Out

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhat’s Playing in Dallas? With Streaming, I Could Find OutOpen-air shows. Joint productions. Filmed dress rehearsals. Here’s a faraway close-up on how one theater community has stayed reasonably robust in adversity.Stage West, a notable Fort Worth theater, hosted a drive-in production from a smaller company at a local university.Credit…Bryan StevensonPublished More

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    Review: Chagall Comes to Life in Enchanting ‘Flying Lovers’

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickReview: Chagall Comes to Life in Enchanting ‘Flying Lovers’Charming performers, elegant design and a smart video capture bring a bittersweet chamber play about the artist and his wife to the screen.Marc Antolin, left, as Marc Chagall, and Audrey Brisson as Bella Chagall in “The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk.”Credit…Wise ChildrenPublished More

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    Feature: Strictly Come Dancing does musicals

    What shows can you still go and see?
    Given that Strictly Come Dancing was dedicated to musicals this weekend, we thought what a great time to remind people that some of these shows can still be seen live at a theatre in the not-too-distant future. So why not treat yourself and get some tickets? Or maybe treat someone else to the gift of theatre this Christmas, after all, theatre tickets really are the greatest gift we can give.
    Strictly Come Dancing – Live shows
    All that glitter and sequins give you the need to see more? Well, there are three different ways you can get to see the show live. The Live Tour features a selection of celebrities and professional dancers, whilst The Professionals and The Power of Dance will bring the professionals to the fore. All three are touring in 2021 and 2022, grab tickets below.

    What about the shows featured over the weekend then? Well, we’ve pulled out the ones that you can see for yourself below.
    & Juliet
    Wasn’t the opening set piece to Sunday night’s results show amazing? We already knew that, having given the stage show a full five stars when we saw it last year. You can see our review by clicking below.

    If that has you eager to see the show for yourself, you are in luck, because & Juliet will be back in the West End from next March. Grab your tickets now from as little as £25.

    Jamie Laing & Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.
    One show that is certainly making waves is Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. You can see our review from last year here.

    Strictly viewers would have seen Made In Chelsea star Jamie Laing and partner Karen performing a rather striking tango to the show’s title song. The show itself returns to the West End from 12 December at Apollo Theatre, and is currently booking through until March. You can snap up tickets from as little as £24.

    Bill Bailey & Phantom of the Opera
    Maybe you were mesmerised by Bill Bailey’s portrayal of the Phantom with his dance partner Oti? Well, Phantom of the Opera will be back in 2021 – we’re just waiting for dates to be confirmed. In the meantime, you can still see Bill Bailey’s stand up show, which is on for a handful of performances from 28 December at Lyceum Theatre. And if you live outside London, he already has dates booking for next December. Check the link below for details and locations.

    Ranvir Singh & Waitress
    One of our lovely team could tell you every line from this musical, but we promise, we won’t inflict that upon you unless you ask nicely. Whilst the show has shut up its counter in the West End, it will be touring the country in 2021. Strangely, you can only buy tickets for the Birmingham shows via Ticketmaster (from whom we receive a commission), but you can see all the other dates at the show’s official website.

    Of course, what we really want to see here at ET is a revival of Little Shop of Horrors. Come on, admit it, we all want to see Audrey 2 come alive again in 2021. More

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    Flea Theater to Shut Down Programs for Emerging Artists

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlea Theater to Shut Down Programs for Emerging ArtistsActors, directors and playwrights who fought for changes at the Flea say they feel betrayed. The theater said it is eliminating their roles, but is promising future residencies that pay.In-person shows are on hold at the Flea Theater’s TriBeCa home, which includes three performance spaces.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York TimesBy More

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    With Germany’s Theaters Closed, the Drama’s Online. Again.

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best TV ShowsBest DanceBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWith Germany’s Theaters Closed, the Drama’s Online. Again.The show must go on, despite a second lockdown, with livestreamed premieres and recent recordings.A scene from Sebastian Hartmann’s staging of Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain.”Credit…Arno DeclairBy More

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    Review: An Audio ‘Streetcar,’ Not Yet Reaching Its Destination

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: An Audio ‘Streetcar,’ Not Yet Reaching Its DestinationAudra McDonald stars as Blanche DuBois in a radio-like production of the Tennessee Williams classic that still has a way to go.Audra McDonald, left, and Ariel Shafir in a rehearsal for the Williamstown Theater Festival and Audible Theater production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreDec. 3, 2020When a great play like Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” gets a major revival with an ideal star like Audra McDonald, but the result is nevertheless a blur, you might be tempted to fault the director, in this case Robert O’Hara.But don’t blame O’Hara so fast. As a stager of revivals, he is probably perfect: both a bomb-throwing activist and a strict constructionist. His production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” for the Williamstown Theater Festival last summer was faithful to the text yet, with just a few theatrical gestures, managed to graffiti over Hansberry’s slight optimism with an awful truth for our times. My colleague Ben Brantley aptly wrote that O’Hara burned “a hole right through” the 60-year-old play.So I was more than eager to see what O’Hara would do at Williamstown this summer with “Streetcar,” a play so overripe with opportunities for rethinking that it almost seemed like low-hanging fruit. Since its debut on Broadway in 1947, it has graduated from American classic to cultural touchstone, many of its lines even better known (thanks in part to the 1951 movie) than the story that gave them birth.Yet that story — of the “apelike” Stanley Kowalski and his “delicate” sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois — was problematic enough to make the first major production after the #MeToo movement a rich opportunity. Its atmosphere of perfumed longing for a past that included Black servants working on white people’s crumbling plantations made it singularly vulnerable, too.McDonald, left, rehearsing the play with Robert O’Hara, the director.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreThat O’Hara’s Williamstown production was to star McDonald, our leading vocal tragedienne — in a part that, though spoken, seems like one long, ascendant aria — made this “Streetcar” a must-see event of the summer.But of course it could not be seen, not then and not now.After the pandemic forced the cancellation of its live season, Williamstown took the novel and in many ways noble route of reconfiguring most of its planned offerings as, essentially, radio dramas, produced with Audible Theater, the audiobook and podcast division of Amazon. “Streetcar,” the first out of the gate, was released on Thursday; three other titles will follow this month, three more in the new year.Most of those upcoming plays being new works, they may not suffer as much as “Streetcar” does from the unasked-for translation to a medium in which it is literally impossible for a director to show us anything. And it turns out that Williams’s pungent language, full of poetic touches for Blanche and brutal ones for Stanley (Ariel Shafir, replacing the better-suited Bobby Cannavale), needs more showing than prosaic plays do, not less. Without faces and bodies to anchor them, and despite McDonald’s willingness to go anywhere emotionally, the lines too often float away or, in Stanley’s case, sink with a thud.What remains isn’t so much bad as flat. Even with sophisticated engineering, audio has a difficult time detailing subtle emotional contours: Everything seems to be happening everywhere all at once. That problem is exacerbated by a podcast limitation O’Hara discovered during rehearsals: “Silence doesn’t help you,” he recently told my colleague Alexis Soloski. “Most times it sounds like someone missed the line or there’s a been a mistake.”Skipping over those aurally unhelpful empty spaces makes for a swift production; it clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, with the play’s three acts combined into one uninterrupted sequence. But haste also eliminates many of the inflection points in the characters’ development as they hustle from high point to low. Carnality, so central to the story — “The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation,” Blanche laments — gets lost in the shuffle.Carla Gugino, left, stars as Stella alongside McDonald’s Blanche DuBois.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreThat’s particularly injurious to our understanding of Stella (Carla Gugino): the fulcrum keeping Stanley and Blanche, her husband and sister, in tenuous balance. Her own swings of affection are almost impossible to register without some of that uncomfortable silence to frame them. And why in any case should we be comfortable about her returning to Stanley after each of his violent outbursts? Williams wants us to struggle with that contradiction.As O’Hara has demonstrated in staging his own work — and in his Tony Award-nominated direction of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” — he usually relishes discomfort and contradiction. But for most of this “Streetcar,” he seems surprisingly hands-off, following Williams’s elaborate instructions about music and sound (rendered for this production by Lindsay Jones) a bit too obviously. If someone is eating, we’re sure to hear the slurp.Only in the climactic scene between Stanley and Blanche, when Stella is at the hospital about to give birth, do things begin to get usefully wild. As Blanche succumbs to panic — and then to Stanley’s sexual violence — O’Hara amps up the expressionism inherent in Williams’s script and lets loose with a hooting, cackling, grunting soundscape of terrifying nightmare noise.This characterization of Stanley as a jungle animal, and Stella as his prey, struck me as a neat reversal of the racist trope usually aimed at Black men, turning it instead into a comment on white men’s violence against women in general and, because we know McDonald is Black, against Black women in particular. To the extent that the playwright’s obvious sympathy for Blanche can sometimes drive “Streetcar” dangerously close to antebellum nostalgia — the DuBois plantation was, after all, called Belle Reve, or “Beautiful Dream” in French — O’Hara’s choice rebalances the picture and subtly detoxifies the narrative.It’s that kind of theatrical activism I expected to hear more of, and that I hope O’Hara gets to explore more fully in a live production with McDonald. She has all the elements of a great Blanche in place, just not the place itself.Onstage, she and O’Hara might also get closer to the molten core of the drama, which isn’t just about the tragedy of the modern always supplanting the antique, the dynamic overcoming the delicate. It’s also about not letting regret for those facts blind you to their necessity. Blanche, however the world has harmed her, has harmed plenty of others. Plantations weren’t pretty; they were sites of violence. If O’Hara can steer “Streetcar” further in that direction, it’ll really be something to see.A Streetcar Named DesireAvailable on Audible; audible.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    2 Major Movies and a Life Shadowed by Pain and Perfectionism

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusClassic Holiday MoviesHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story2 Major Movies and a Life Shadowed by Pain and PerfectionismKemp Powers is the co-director of “Soul” and screenwriter of “One Night in Miami,” but his collaborators may not know just how much of himself is in those films.“I’ve had a year that writers, creatives in Hollywood don’t get to have, ever,” Kemp Powers said.Credit…Texas Isaiah for The New York TimesBy More