Eye on Theatre: Youth Will Be Served By JOHN SIMON

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<<< 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 …

Hezi ArisEye on Theatre: Youth Will Be Served By JOHN SIMON

Eye on Theatre: That Championship Season By John Simon

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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, …

Hezi ArisEye on Theatre: That Championship Season By John Simon

Eye on Theatre: Paean To A Player By John Simon

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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 …

Hezi ArisEye on Theatre: Paean To A Player By John Simon

Eye on Theatre: The Misanthrope By John Simon

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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 …

Hezi ArisEye on Theatre: The Misanthrope By John Simon