I’m fairly certain that, wherever he was, director Jay O’Berski was chortling to himself as he read my column last week. Particularly this part: “Clearly, artists have the right to reimagine the classics, to try to make their own interpretive mark upon the immortals. When they do, we root for them to find new insights […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inArt
New dance–with strings attached
Go ahead. Get ready to add another name to that choreographers shortlist for the region. But when you do, put a major question mark by the company that showed her work last weekend in Chapel Hill. For if none of the pieces in the annual MODERNEXTENSION concert had aspired to more than boilerplate, recital-grade dance […]
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Cyrano’s too reasonable at Playmakers Rep
If director/adaptor Joseph Haj was attempting to deliberately downplay Cyrano de Bergerac‘s more fantastical elements in order to make the title character more approachable, more life-sized to contemporary audiences, he has succeeded. That is the triumph–and the trouble–with this new take on the famous 19th-century drama. Clearly, artists have the right to reimagine the classics, […]
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Dancing into overtime–and a tribute to a stilled voice
Since the balcony was closed, the main floor of UNC’s Memorial Hall was packed last Friday night for an event that is now being termed the inaugural TRIANGLE DANCE FESTIVAL FOR AIDS. Final reports: 530 people–easily one of the largest dance audiences outside of the American Dance Festival that I have ever witnessed in this […]
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Reviews
*** 1/2 THE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR, Duke Theater Studies–Particularly during the first part of this toothsome excursion into the absurd, the broad side of the political barn is duly walloped: A scuzzy mayor beats about the Bush in a flight suit while trying to bluff an intimidating newcomer, before exquisitely mannered lackeys from Justice, Education and […]
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The other things you hunger for
There is one thing playwright Jeanmarie Williams and director Joseph Megel would like you to know. Vanishing Marion, the domestic drama that StreetSigns Center gives a world premiere Thursday night, is not a play about eating disorders. “No,” Williams says, flatly, at one point in our conversation last week. “The last thing I would want […]
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An eleventh-hour conversion?
We’re meant to believe that the souls of several mountain people are tried during the course of Brother Wolf, the music theater drama whose world premiere closes this weekend at Triad Stage in Greensboro. By the looks of things, all of those tests pale when compared to the temptations playwright and director Preston Lane must […]
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An interruption in programming
It’s one of the routines of daily life: You sit for a moment–over breakfast, over coffee, at the end of the day. You read the paper; you either listen to or watch the news. It’s a special moment–the moment in which composer Vijay Iyer and performance poet Mike Ladd would like to say one word: […]
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Reviews of what’s playing now in the Triangle
**** The Fall to Earth, Manbites Dog Theater–Playwright Joel Drake Johnson pushes the limits early: After 10 taxing minutes of matriarch Fay’s non-stop blather, her chilly adult daughter Rachel–and the audience–are both eyeing the door. But just beyond that first inkling of what Rachel’s childhood must have been like, we learn that the pair has […]
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Dangerously low current
So much of the finest in regional modern dance and choreography was in Hanes Auditorium at Chapel Hill High School last Saturday night–in the audience, in the wings and on the playbill, listed in the production staff for Choreo Collective’s Current Collection. Thus the inconvenient but crucial question remains: Why was so little of it […]
