Erica Getto Choreographed Uncertainty Even the most rigorous viewing of a Trisha Brown dance will never quite reveal the springs and levers that hold it together. June 22, 2022
Sam Huber The Boundaries of Kinship In her plays, Alice Childress revealed how vulnerable even the most private, self-enclosed spaces are to history’s incursions. May 17, 2022
Geoffrey O’Brien Verdi’s Decentered Epic The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained. April 21, 2022 issue
Brian Seibert Never the Same Step Twice Where the previous generation of dancers arranged their steps into tidy, regular phrases, John Bubbles enjambed over the bar lines, multiplying, twisting, tilting, turning. May 12, 2022 issue
James Shapiro Shakespeare Noir There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and Joel Coen feel in perfect alignment. January 13, 2022 issue
Geoffrey O’Brien Notes from Underground Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character. January 13, 2022 issue
Tim Page Playing Together In the late 1980s, when composers and audiences moved in deeply divided circles, Bang on a Can’s commitment to diverse programming began to break down the divisions within contemporary music. November 18, 2021 issue
Larry Wolff A Halo of Nostalgia The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire. November 4, 2021 issue
Rachel Eisendrath I Killed a Man Back There If, as Hamlet claims, every play holds a “mirror up to nature,” what kind of mirror is Robert Icke’s production? August 10, 2022
Simon Callow Shape-Shifters In The Method Isaac Butler traces the evolution of an acting theory that was both ferociously denounced and fanatically embraced. August 18, 2022 issue
Adam Kirsch Black Voices, German Song What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms? February 10, 2022 issue
Ian Frazier ‘Part of Why We Survived’ A new history of the long tradition of Native comedy, inside and outside mainstream entertainment January 13, 2022 issue
Coco Fusco Whose Art Thrives in Cuba? Art and dance were battlegrounds for the struggle to define the meaning of the revolution. December 16, 2021 issue
Dan Chiasson Larger Than Life Nearly sixty years after its founding, Bread and Puppet Theater still has the power to unsettle, despite evoking old battles, old adversaries, and perhaps even lost causes. September 23, 2021 issue
Imani Perry In Her Own Voice To be a Black artist has always required one to fight as well as create. July 1, 2021 issue
Fintan O’Toole Theater, Politics, and Critic “The way the personal and the political overlap in certain public lives can be illuminating for both arenas.” May 22, 2021
Matthew Aucoin A Dance to the Music of Death Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape. May 13, 2021 issue
Dan Chiasson This Ain’t No Disco Talking Heads were at once a party band and an art project. March 25, 2021 issue
