Dmitry Zvonkov

GHOSTS WILL POSSESS YOU The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people. —Peter Straub, The Throat Outstanding performances from a first-rate cast and Jack O’Brien’s expert direction make his staging of Mark O’Rowe’s new version of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, currently playing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center,…

Metamorphoses is the third show by Dmitry Krymov and Krymov Lab NYC that I have seen (the first was Three Love Stories Near the Railroad; the second Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” In Our Own Words), and despite the fact that this production mostly fails, I remain a hopeful fan. Mr. Krymov creates absurdist works that look…

ADD THIS TO YOUR BECKETT LIST Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave, comprised of three short works by the playwright—Not I, Play, and Krapp’s Last Tape—soundly directed without intermission by Ciarán O`Reilly at Irish Rep, makes for a nice little microdose of art for someone whose weeks, from a cultural standpoint, consist of…

PUTIN ON THE FRITZ The most entertaining part of Manhattan Theater Club‘s Vladimir, which opened tonight at NY City Center, was the tirade the woman sitting behind me went into during intermission, pointing out to her companions the play’s numerous historical inaccuracies, double standards, instances of naiveté, ignorance and anti-Putin propaganda, as well as its…

The excellent Michael Stuhlbarg is continuously entertaining in Peter Morgan’s bio-play Patriots, leading the cast as Boris Berezovsky, a Russian-Jewish mathematician and businessman who became one of the original’”and most powerful’”oligarchs in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia of the 1990s, but who fell out of favor with Vladimir Putin, fled to Europe, and ended his life a…

DEAD MEAT There is a notion floating around that critics get pleasure from bashing shows. I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s been my experience that most reviewers love the theater. Personally, I want every production I see to be good, to work, to have something: energy, theatricality, artistry, to be interesting, deep, funny, moving….

The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry. — Andrei Tarkovsky “This is a children’s show,” informed the Krymov Lab NYC stage manager after showing us where we could hang up our coats, “so please pick a child and take it with you into the theater.” She gestured towards an alcove full of “children”…

A VICTORIOUS ROMP In Ossie Davis’s 1961 play Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch–which opened last night at The Music Box Theatre–all the black residents of contemporary Cotchipee county, Georgia, work on Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee’s (Jay O. Sanders) cotton plantation. They live on his land, in shacks that he owns, and owe…

A SHARK HAS TO KEEP MOVING FORWARD, OR ELSE IT DIES — WHAT WE HAVE ON OUR HANDS HERE IS A LIVING SHARK Stories abound about the problem-plagued production of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws, a thriller about a 25-foot-long great white shark that eats unsuspecting swimmers around the (fictional) island of Amity, New York,…

A NOT-SO-DEMON BARBER ON INCOHESIVE STREET Annaleigh Ashford’s thoroughly delightful and sympathetic portrayal of Mrs. Lovett, the good-humored but sinister piemaker is, unfortunately, one of the few compelling elements in Thomas Kail’s lackluster revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical, with book by Hugh Wheeler based on…

A GOOD SIGN FOR BROADWAY First-rate performances and Anne Kaufman’s near-flawless direction work well to conceal the few shortcomings in Lorraine Hansberry’s thoughtful and compelling The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, making this revival — which recently moved from BAM to Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theater  — rich with energy, emotion and life. Ms. Kaufman’s dynamic…

NOW AND ZEN Coming out of the Baryshnikov Arts Center after watching its current offering The Hunting Gun, I overheard a woman ask her husband what he thought of the show. Good, but long, he said, which pretty much mirrored my reaction to this mostly Japanese-language production based on the novella by Yasushi Inoue. Adapted…

THIS RAT MAY BE A LITTLE SQUEAKY, BUT IT’S WORTH GETTING CAUGHT IN ITS TRAP Elizabeth Gray is perfect as Olive Lloyd-Kennedy, the kind insightful dry-witted writer who predicts disaster if her flatmate Sheila Brandreth (Sarin Monae West), a brilliant young author, marries Keld Maxwell (James Evans), an inferior but popular up-and-coming playwright in Alexander…

WHAT’S BEEN DONE TO DEATH What cache Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic Death of a Salesman has in terms of power and artistry, nuance, subtlety and insight, is buried by Miranda Cromwell’s ineffectual staging currently on display at the Hudson Theatre. Neither the director nor most of the cast demonstrate anything but the most superficial connection…

SEE THE LIGHT Illustrious lighting designer Jennifer Tipton will share an exhibit of light in Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Jerome Robbins Theater for three performances only, November 17-19, 2022. Our Days and Night is designed to show the relationship of the earth to the sun, tracing the origin and precarity of the sun’s support of life,…

THE PUBLIC THEATER ANNOUNCES CASTING FOR WORLD PREMIERE PLAY CULLUD WATTAH Written by Erika Dickerson-Despenza Directed by Candis C. Jones Above is the cast for the world premiere of CULLUD WATTAH (think: “colored water”). Developed by Dickerson-Despenza as the 2019-2020 Tow Playwright-in-Residence at The Public, the play — originally scheduled to premiere in July 2020…

NOW IN PREVIEWS PERFORMANCES BEGIN TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2021 LIMITED 7-WEEK ENGAGEMENT The amazing theater company BEDLAM is coming back to New York with  PERSUASION,  a new play by  Sarah Rose Kearns  adapted from the novel by  Jane Austen, and directed by  Eric Tucker. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, a shy English spinster seeks to win back the love…