Michael M. Landman-Karny

PULLED OUT OF MYTH AND INTO THE HEADLINES Kenneth Cavander relocates Thebes to a near-future America, and something is lost in the move I first read Antigone in a basement college classroom in the fall of 1984, the week the polls turned against Walter Mondale. Kreon sounded like the calm voice on the evening news…

LORCA IN DRAG, WITH HIS CLAWS INTACT Rodrigo García and Ugho Badú reimagine a Spanish classic without dulling its edge Lorca wrote for women’s voices and then watched the world go silent on him. Carlota: Alhajero de Secretos (Carlota: Jewelry Box of Secrets) hands those voices to men, and the swap is the honest move….

BRIGADOON EARNS ITS MIRACLE Pasadena Playhouse’s revelatory new production treats Lerner and Loewe’s fable not as nostalgia, but as a question of faith, sacrifice, and survival Dormancy is a survival strategy. Seeds use it. Bears use it. A village in the Scottish Highlands uses it in Brigadoon, which premiered on Broadway in 1947 — the…

The Salon at the End of the Century: The Cardinal Assumption of Dark Library H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896, The Invisible Man in 1897, and The War of the Worlds in 1898. Four books in four years, each one inventing a genre. He wrote them…

DON’T BLAME MILLENNIALS: MILLENNIALS ARE KILLING MUSICALS IS KILLING MUSICALS (OR, WHEN SATIRE EATS ITSELF) An exhausting, vulgar, and unfocused musical that mistakes noise for insight and collapses into the very thing it claims to critique. There is a song in Millennials Are Killing Musicals, the new tuner currently suffocating at the Colony Theatre in…

A HELL OF A MOUTHFUL A play where grief, faith, and ambition collide —and silence carries the weight Jacobson knows that the domestic and the exalted do not occupy different rooms. Hell Mouth, now receiving a luminous production at The Road Theatre Company, opens on a son cleaning his dying father and pivots, in a…

EVERYTHING’S COMING UP JULE Broadway’s golden-age hits return in a world premiere revue that treats them as living drama Jule Styne’s name tends to arrive attached to titles that feel immovable. Gypsy. Funny Girl. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The songs have outlived their original performers, yet they still seem written for bodies onstage, for voices under…

THE DREAM ON CREDIT A clear-eyed, unsentimental staging that lets Miller’s argument land with full force Arthur Miller finished Act I of Death of a Salesman in a single day and the rest in six weeks, which tells you something about the pressure behind it. He had been watching his uncle Manny Newman for years,…