Performing Arts

The Ambivalences of ‘Don Giovanni’

Opera’s most famous libertine, who embodies freedom not only from social and political constraints but from sexuality, religion, and morality itself, has always been a disturbing figure.

August 17, 2023 issue

Andrew Martin

An Off-Kilter Epic

In a revival of Tennessee Williams’s rarely staged Orpheus Descending, small-town outcasts buck the codes of southern propriety.

July 30, 2023

Edward Ball

‘Tell Your Story, Omar’

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

May 25, 2023 issue

Martin Filler

Poet of Shubert Alley

The late Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick, in Fiddler on the Roof and above all She Loves Me, gave the musical comedy a rare insight, poetic delicacy, and emotional intimacy.

June 30, 2023

Geoffrey O’Brien

Lope Lives!

A rare new production of Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna brings home the play’s sense of threatened violence and constant danger.

June 13, 2023

Liza Batkin

She Said, She Said

Suzie Miller’s one-woman play, starring Jodie Comer, shows that survivors of sexual assault are too often disbelieved in court but offers a worrying solution.

June 10, 2023

Adam Kirsch

Arias of Despair

What can opera elicit from The Hours that the page and the screen cannot?

February 9, 2023 issue

Joan Acocella

‘The Real World Is Not Here’

Balanchine’s dances often gladden our hearts in order to break them, whereupon they tell us that we have to go on living anyway.

June 8, 2023 issue

On Dance

Sonia Delaunay: Danseuse, deuxieme version, 1916

Clair Wills

Stepping Out

The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent.

August 20, 2020 issue

A scene in the Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadère, 1900; from Marius Petipa: La Dansomanie, a two-volume album in three languages published last year by the St. Petersburg Museum of Theater and Music to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Petipa’s birth

Joan Acocella

Souls in Single File

On Marius Petipa, the most productive and influential ballet choreographer of the late nineteenth century.

December 19, 2019 issue

Jennifer Homans

Hail Balanchine

‘Serenade’ has no story or narrative. It is internal—inward, like the music, and more of a prayer or ritual than a theatrical spectacle.

December 21, 2017 issue

J. Hoberman

Jammin’ in the Panoram

During World War II, proto–music videos called “soundies” blared pop patriotism from visual jukeboxes across American bars.

September 2, 2023

Incomparable

In recent years Sinéad O’Connor wrested her story back from a sneering media. But “if anyone truly wants to know me,” she wrote, “the best way is through my songs.”

August 5, 2023

Martin Filler

Too Good for Hollywood

Despite her long career on stage and screen—from an Oscar nomination to the blacklist—Aline MacMahon never became a household name.

June 22, 2023 issue

Joan Acocella

From Russia, with Love

In her monumental new biography of Balanchine, Jennifer Homans tells the story of the choreographer whose modernist extension of classicism forever altered American dance.

May 25, 2023 issue

Andrew Martin

Every Man His Own Hipster

A new production of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window retains the play’s sense of imperfect community and teeming life.

May 3, 2023

Jarrett Earnest

Art Is a Drug

General Idea’s art was poised on a razor’s edge between complicity and critique; it is an inescapable precedent for thinking about artistic production in the twenty-first century.

May 11, 2023 issue