Performing Arts

Bella Abzug’s Fight for a Broader Feminism

On the feisty congresswoman’s posthumous return to the spotlight.

November 5, 2020 issue

Missed Steps

So many steps! So many turns! A leap. A landing. And done. The other dancers had no trouble remembering the steps. I had trouble.

August 26, 2020

Derek Walcott in New York

Derek Walcott had many New Yorks, and all of them played a part in his life and in his evolution as a writer. But perhaps the most important of all his New York sojourns was the one from the Fifties.

July 29, 2020

An Interview with David Adjmi

David Adjmi’s newly published memoir, Lot Six, as well as his play Stunning, are testament to a rapturous ability to capture the cadence and idiosyncrasies of a group never previously brought to dramatic life in mainstream culture.

July 23, 2020

The Opposite of Ordinary

July 2, 2020 issue

The Plays of Richard Nelson

Richard Nelson’s recent play The Michaels is subtitled “Conversations During Difficult Times” but it’s every bit as much about what goes unsaid.

May 26, 2020

Witness to a Mystery

June 11, 2020 issue

Opera at the Edge

Perhaps, in our newfound state of isolation, we can learn new ways to listen across borders, with open ears

May 14, 2020 issue

A Winter’s Night at the Bolshoi, 1985

By the time we reached the Bolshoi, Sverdlov Square was swathed in white. Even the granite Karl Marx facing the theater no longer looked as though he was trying to break out of the massive rock but was leaning into it, rather. 

March 6, 2020

The Winking Satire of ‘Agrippina’

Agrippina, the Handel opera now premiering on the Metropolitan Opera’s stage, may have been written as a satire on the politics of its own time, but in the hands of producer Sir David McVicar, and set in the present day, it offers a timely paradigm of hypocrisy, corruption, and sexual manipulation in the halls of power.  

March 1, 2020