<<< The Company of RENT performs "La Vie Boheme." Photo by Joan Marcus. John Simon. >>> This is no review for young people; no one under 50 or even 60 need read it. It is about Rent, which I have been repeatedly lukewarm about, back only three years after its long run closed. It is revived to cater to the …
Eye on Theatre: That Championship Season By John Simon
Jason Miller’s That Championship Season is a play about nothing less than life itself. In a microcosm under microspocic scrutiny, basketball becomes the shabby, crooked, treacherous struggle for survival, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, the author’s hometown, becomes America and, ultimately, the world. It is old-fashioned theater, if you will, but it compelligly stinks of the cold sweat of crass compromise, failure, …
Eye on Theatre: Paean To A Player By John Simon
Sometimes in the theater a performance is so good that it renders everything else secondary. Such is the case of When I Come to Die, in which Chris Chalk (pictured right>>>)chalks up a resounding success. Nathan Louis Jackson’s drama takes place on death row in Indiana State Prison. Two adjoining cells are on view. The inmate to our right is …
Eye on Theatre: The Misanthrope By John Simon
Although Moliere himself considered his masterpiece, The Misanthrope, a comedy, it is, in some ways, closer to a tragicomedy. Otherwise put, what distinguishes a serious comedy from a mere farce is its having something serious to say underneath, which allows us to see that drama and comedy are the two sides of the same coin, and that that coin is …