A show whose thematic “Oomh!” comes from the Broadway songbook’s emotional depth and camp-friendly absurdities has arrived on West 42nd Street—the very doorstep of its source material—to throw down the gauntlet. Fortunately for us, the gauntlet is actually two pairs of long satin evening gloves worn with confident, comedic ferocity by native-to-Florida drag queens Ginger […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | The 2024 Dance on Camera festival, running February 9-12 at Lincoln Center, is particularly rich and diverse. The world’s longest-running assemblage of dance film—now in its 52nd year—presents, in 11 different programs, a mix of shorts and features from around the world. Up first (Feb. 9, 7pm) is the full-length Swan […]
BY MAX BURBANK December 12, 2019: A cluster of patients in China’s Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan, begin to experience the symptoms of an atypical pneumonia-like illness that does not respond well to standard treatment.—The CDC Museum’s COVID-19 Timeline March 11, 2020: With 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths, the World […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | The Broadway transfer of the award-winning Off-Broadway play Prayer for the French Republic could not be more timely. As written by Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews, Significant Other), it concerns various clashes within a Jewish family in France in 2016-17 as nerves fray due to the latest rise of antisemitism. Arriving at […]
BY TRAV S.D. | One never knows what to expect when one sees a show at the Torn Page space on West 22nd Street—but you can usually count on surprise, and can certainly bank on an intimate experience. Based in the old Chelsea townhouse of stage and screen giants Rip Torn and Geraldine Page, most […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | I’m generally adept at drawing out my interview subjects, because I’m a pretty good listener and besides, I project a sort of passivity which enables the stars to unburden me with their most private truths. I love the whole process, with me posing insouciant questions, then sitting back and letting them […]
Nirvana and So Much More BY PUMA PERL Before we were rudely interrupted we played some great shows Max’s Reunions Pandemoniums Café Bohemia Attended a bunch, too MC5 Bush Tetras Blondie Did a lot of poetry readings Wrote a book Contributed to The Villager Reviewed the Tribeca Film Festival Late night dinners at Veselka Gallery […]
BY CHARLI BATTERSBY | I walked into October 12-15’s New York Comic Con with a simple goal: Buy a comic book. Keith Giffen, one of my favorite comic book writers, had died earlier that week, and I wanted to find an issue of his Justice League from the “Bwah Ha Ha!” era in the late […]
BY EILEEN STUKANE | On the stage where I Need That is in performance, the curtain, playing the part of a canvas, offers a painted aerial view of streets and houses—a grid of suburbia in Anywhere, USA. My Playbill is even more specific: “Place: New Jersey” and “Time: Now.” Spilling from beneath the curtain and […]
BY CHARLI BATTERSBY | The Jewish Comics Experience (or “JewCE”) was announced before October 7, although the timing of the event is perfectly in tune with November 2023’s zeitgeist. The Golden Age superheroes like Superman, Captain America, and Batman were all created by Jews in the late 1930s. This is neither a coincidence, nor revisionist […]