Gershwin Redux: Crazy for You

The company of Goodspeed's Crazy for You. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

Crazy for You is the second of three Broadway musicals – so far – to rework hit shows with fabulous scores by George and Ira Gershwin. The first was My One and Only (1983), which had begun life in 1927 as Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire with his first dance partner, his sister Adele. The most recent was Nice Work If You Can Get It (2012), which is based loosely on the 1926 Oh, Kay! – best known as the musical in which the great, one-of-a-kind English performer Gertrude Lawrence introduced the beloved ballad “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

The Five Colours of White

Ink-and-Brush painting by Zhang Shuqi. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

In the glass-and-concrete halls of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, Zhang Shuqi’s work bursts with an urgency that belies its age. Echoes of the Homeland is a retrospective of a Chinese painter long overshadowed in the West. A native of Zhejiang Province, Zhang Shuqi (or Chang Shu Chi, 1900–1957) was hailed as one of the “Three Masters of Jinling” along with Xu Beihong (1895–1953) and Liu Zigu (1901–1986), pioneers who adapted traditional ink-and-brush to a modern world. Amid the fourth-floor galleries, his flowering branches and roiling flocks of fowl feel like a living ecosystem, each petal and plume pulsing with the tensions of war, exile, and cultural survival.

Lemons: Joe Mantello Directs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Laurie Metcalf, a carton of organic milk, and Nathan Lane in Death of a Salesman. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.)

When I heard director Joe Mantello was setting the current revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in a garage, I misheard it as the garage. So I assumed it meant the garage attached to the Lomans’ house. As far as reconceptions of classic American theater go, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. But no: It wasn’t the garage, it was a garage. But what set designer Chloe Lamford provides isn’t even a garage—it’s a huge industrial warehouse with a large rollup metal door and piles of debris and dirt everywhere. (That Lamford won a Tony for her set is far more unsettling than anything in the play.) The characters sleep on metal benches, meals at a metal table, and walk barefoot on the dirty floor. The structure earns garage-icity when the metal door ascends and Willy Loman drives his car into the warehouse to begin the play. (It ends with Willy backing the car off the stage. Symbolism.) I get that the America Dream is a lie, that Willie’s life is a big empty warehouse (I would argue that it’s actually a small empty warehouse), but do you need to hit the audience with a sledgehammer (and an ugly one at that) to make that point? Salesman isn’t a naturalistic play--there are flashbacks and fantasy sequences; Jo Mielziner’s famous set for the original Broadway production was widely seen as an expressionistic wonder -- but when the stage is so bereft of any hint of visual beauty or interest, you wonder why Willy doesn’t kill himself sooner.

Found in Translation: Wayne McGregor’s MADDADDAM, Reconsidered

Heather Ogden in the National Ballet of Canada's MADDADDAM. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

In 2022, I walked out of Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre and wrote that MADDADDAM — Wayne McGregor’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of visionary novels — had gotten lost in translation, the story confounding, the choreography swallowed by its own scenography. Watching the National Ballet of Canada’s revival last Saturday night, I retract nearly all of it. This time I was not confused so much as conquered. I felt, for the first time, that I was in the presence of genius.

Hello, Dolly!: Ogunquit Playhouse Puts On Its Sunday Clothes

Beth Leavel as Dolly Levi and company in Hello Dolly! (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

Six decades on, Hello, Dolly! is seen as a prime representative of the golden age of Broadway musicals, but the fact is, that era was rolling into its final years, before rock ‘n’ roll and the bitterness of the Vietnam War wore it down. Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s musical adaptation of the 1954 Thornton Wilder farce The Matchmaker, set in Gilded Age New York, lasted on Broadway for seven years and toured for longer, but its producer, David Merrick, turned it into a vehicle with revolving-door stars stepping in to play the marriage broker Dolly Levi, most of them relics from the 1940s. And the musical, with its overweight production values and its thin farce plot – about how the marriage broker Dolly Levi, commissioned by the Yonkers hay and feed shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder to find him a wife, captures him for herself while abetting the courtship of three young couples – grew more arthritic as time pressed on. When Barbra Streisand took over the title role in the otherwise plodding 1969 movie, her astonishing stockpile of talents and unique old-style/new-style presence lit up the fading material like fireworks; she was a godsend. But what contemporary mountings of Hello, Dolly! have shown – from the version at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2013 to the triumphant 2017 Broadway revival to the newly opened one at the Ogunquit Playhouse – is that, liberated from the notion that audiences are paying to watch a guest star in a variety show, it can be a first-rate entertainment.

Resurgence: The Christophers

Michaela Cole and Ian McKellan in The Christophers. (Photo: Department M.)

There isn’t a sentimental moment in Ian McKellen’s portrayal of the artist Julian Sklar in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. Julian is a painter in the sunset of his life who hasn’t made any new work in twenty years; he’s long since faded from celebrity, but a mystique remains around an unfinished series known as “the Christophers,” which he abandoned when he broke up with the lover to whom they were dedicated. His dreadful children (amusingly sketched by James Corden and Jessica Gunning), with whom he has apparently had no relationship for years, terrified that at his death they will be left without any inheritance, hire a young artist named Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) to forge finished versions of the paintings if indeed they exist at all, or to create them if they don’t. They persuade her to apply for the job of their dad’s new assistant in order to gain entrée to his studio. But though Lori has a history with Sklar that he is unaware of and that should definitely encourage her to take his children’s side – as a nineteen-year-old aspiring painter, she endured a withering critique by him on a TV show – her response to the young Sklars’ mission turns out to be very complicated. So is Ed Solomon’s intriguing screenplay, which weighs the questions of legacy and ownership in the arts and the bearing of the personal on the artistic as no movie has since Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours in 2008.

I Am a Camera: Three Historic Photographers

(Princeton University Press.)

“I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, just recording not thinking. Recording. Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, and fixed.”

--Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories

“A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. All things are photographable.”

--Garry Winogrand

How sweet it is! When your three favourite modernist photographers get the huge exhibition and publication acclaim they all deserved separately but which is all the more illuminating and meaningful if read, studied, viewed and reviewed as an ensemble, as a hugely important creative constellation of innovative artists. Such is the joy that arrives spontaneously when one picks up this highly significant exhibition catalogue (artfully disguised as a gorgeously designed coffee table art book), Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, published by Princeton University Press in conjunction with the Princeton University Art Museum. It is a well-earned testament to the achievements of three titans who literally defined the terms by which all photographers after them would be assessed. And the astute author/curator Brendan Fay is the ideal candidate for such a monumental undertaking: his eye and mind will help any reader or viewer, whether they are familiar with these artists or just seeing them for the very first time, come to a fulsome appreciation for what makes these photographic giants... well, so gigantic. White (1908-1976), Siskind (1903-1991) and Callahan (1912-1999), are exemplars of a certain kind of quiet seeing: an intimate and reverential attention to detail and ambience which they share in an elegant and austere manner. I often refer to them as the Vermeers of photography, and Fay’s book confirms it.

Fated and Fully Realized: A Triumphant Kismet opens the National Ballet’s Spring Season

Genevieve Penn Nabity and the artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Kismet. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

In the promotional video the National Ballet of Canada released ahead of Kismet, the world-premiere ballet by Jera Wolfe that opened a double bill at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre on May 29, the Métis-Canadian choreographer speaks of a central figure on a journey, unable to outrun a destiny. Take him at his word and you’ll search the stage in vain for plot. Better to let the literal narrative go.

Dostoevsky in the Water Town

The Dostoyevsky: Man is a Mystery exhibit at the Muxin Art Museum. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

To reach the Muxin Art Museum, one first passes through Wuzhen, a historic water town in Zhejiang Province that has been carefully polished for tourism. Stone paths are kept immaculately clean, boats drift slowly through the canals, and the entire district often feels suspended in a state of permanent display. At the edge of Yuanbao Lake, the museum rises as a cluster of spare concrete volumes designed by OLI Architecture. The shift from the cultivated brightness outside to the cool, inward atmosphere of the galleries is immediate.

Lost in the Labyrinths of the Mind: Backrooms

Chiwetel Ejiofor in Kane Parson's Backrooms. (Photo: A24 Pictures.)

Kane Parsons’s Backrooms is some very clever filmmaking. The elevator pitch could’ve been “Skinamarink, but cinematic.”

Object Lessons: Videotape

(Bloomsbury Books.)

“Objects have the longest memories of all. Beneath their stillness, they are alive with all the experiences they have ever witnessed.”

--Teju Cole

Object Lessons, published by Bloomsbury Books, is an illuminating series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. As Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy’s incisive biography of this impactful technology reveals, over the span of a single decade, the VHS format changed the privileged relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then mysteriously sank back into oblivion. Although what we now call streaming has assumed prominence, the legacy of the humble videotape still continues to inform modern entertainment. And I’m delighted to say that both Godeanu-Kenworthy and I appear to share a similar, if not parallel, fondness for the technology that preceded our present stream-mad dimension. Here’s my outset admission: I’ve always been a huge fan of the analog world, its haptic tone and the various shapes it took, and I still am. The author of this charming little book, which has a giant subject and theme that belies its scale, also shares in her book’s beginnings what might account for her fondness. Our first exposure to any given medium of expression is often the most effective for our successive modes of experience.

No Business Like Show Business: When Playwrights Kill

Beth Leavel and Marissa Jaret Winokur in When Playwrights Kill. (Photo: Jim Sabitus.)

When Playwrights Kill is a comedy à clef whose code can be deciphered by anyone who keeps up with theatrical gossip. In 2019 Faye Dunaway was fired from the Boston tryout of Matthew Lombardo’s one-woman show about Katharine Hepburn, Tea at Five, for physically and verbally abusive behavior backstage, and the production was terminated. Lombardo had written Tea at Five in 2002 for Kate Mulgrew, who played it off Broadway and elsewhere, but it was the draw of Dunaway’s return to the New York stage after nearly four decades that secured the play’s first Broadway contract, which was cancelled following the Dunaway debacle. (A sympathetic 2024 HBO documentary, Faye, chalks her hijinks up to bipolar disorder.) 

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Life of Katherine Mansfield

(Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press)

“Books are the mirrors of the soul. If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell the truth about other people.”

—Virginia Woolf

“I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw upon one’s familiar real life, to find the treasure in that.”

—Katherine Mansfield

I will readily admit that I was woefully late in coming to the awareness that writers such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were remarkably experimental in the manner and mode with which they assumed an ascendency among the most prominent and important members of the literary modernist canon of the 20th century. I suppose I fell under the sway of louder modernists (for lack of a better word) such as rabble-rousers like James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. But Woolf and especially Mansfield were far quieter modernists, though they shook up the stylistic status quo with equal fervour and daring aplomb. It didn’t help her status that Mansfield concentrated almost exclusively on the short story, or that she died painfully young, thirty-four, of tuberculosis in 1923, just as modernism itself was building up its full head of steam. So I’m delighted to report that Gerri Kimber’s new biography of Mansfield, called A Hidden Life, released by Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, manages to correct an abundance of gaps in our appreciation of just who she was and what she accomplished in her sad but turbulent life.

Grief and The Goshawk: H Is for Hawk and Other Recent Movies

Claire Foy in H Is for Hawk. (Photo: Roadside Pictures.)

Among the books I brought with me on a trip at the end of my semester break this year was a lovely recent memoir called Raising Hare in which the author, Claire Dalton, who has grown up with the principle that human beings should never interfere with the workings of the wild, chronicles the discovery of a leveret on her land, close to death. Despite her predilections, Dalton makes the decision to try to save the young hare’s life and then, instinctually, begins to share her home – exterior and interior – with this creature with which she’s fallen in love, redesigning it to accommodate its needs and comforts.

Imaging Irony: Without Empathy / 8 Filmmakers

(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“Censorship is the mother of all metaphor.”

Jorge Luis Borges

It’s always heartening to encounter other lovers of cinematic art who resonate with one’s own passions for moving pictures that speak in a kind of secret language that we alone can fully understand. Even if that we is a large multitude of sorts, the pleasures we share in the brilliant darkness of movie theatres still seem to situate us in a private world unfolding before our mesmerized eyes. Between the flickering screen and our witnessing selves there is a shared bond which speaks to us in a dialect constructed from images that often tell a story somewhat different from the linear narrative of the screenplay script.

Urgency and Grace: The National Ballet’s Flight Pattern and Suite en blanc

The National Ballet of Canada company in Flight Pattern. (Photo: Ted Belton.)

The National Ballet of Canada opens its 2026 winter season with a study in contrast — the searing humanism of Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern and Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc, here staged to radiant precision by former Paris Opera Ballet étoile Charles Jude. Together they form a dialogue across eras: one confronting the fractures of our contemporary world, the other reaffirming ballet’s formal beauty and historical resilience.

More from Criterion: His Girl Friday

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

The complicated saga of the funniest comedy ever written by Americans began in 1928, when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page opened on Broadway. It’s a newspaper play, an especially flavorful version of the hard-boiled comedy, a genre that flourished in the Roaring Twenties. (The other signature samples are the war play What Price Glory? from 1924 by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings; Chicago, set mostly in Cook Country Jail, from 1926; and Once in a Lifetime from 1930 by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, a burlesque of Hollywood’s rocky passage from silent movies to talkies. Chicago, of course, got new life as a Broadway musical nearly half a century after Maurine Watkins wrote the original version.) In The Front Page, the best reporter in Chicago, Hildy Johnson, quits his job – and his sly, manipulative editor, Walter Burns – to get married, move to New York and launch himself into a less disreputable career. But he never gets there because on his way out he gets embroiled in a sensational story about a convicted murderer who escapes from his jail on the eve of his hanging due to the incompetence of the sheriff, who has also colluded in the burying of his reprieve from the governor. This is prime hard-boiled comedy: the press corps may be expert fabricators, but the forces of law and order and the local government are truly corrupt. At the end Hildy realizes what we – and Walter – knew all along: that he’s a reporter to the bone. Plus Burns whips up one final trick to keep him from leaving, prompting one of the most memorable curtain lines in Broadway history.

Iconophilia: Perpetual Morphosis

(Zone Books, Princeton University Press.)

“Unframedness. Presentness. Immediateness. It is under these three titles — intimately related — that we now experience the image by means of those devices that constitute image-making strategies: virtual immersive environments.”

Andrea Pinotti

The title of this breathtakingly insightful book by Andrea Pinotti, At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality, should be taken quite literally. Consider it what rightly amounts to a veritable biography of the Image: its history, both overt and covert in all our lives, and as both a secret story communally shared and also an unimaginable one taunting us to keep going towards what used to be called the future. The book’s image-archive extends from a time long before any recorded history even existed, right through to a time after which history, at least as we once regarded it, may also have vanished. And perhaps owing to the sheer acceleration and amplification of our lives, the future of the real and recognizable image itself might even have ceased to exist at all. The most succinct and accurate synopsis of At the Threshold of the Image is equally breathless: this is an exploration of the impact of immersive experiences on visual practices from cave painting to virtual reality.

Dance You Want to Know: Small Screens, Post‑Pandemic Stages and the Pull of the Crowd

A still from CDK Company's dance video, Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know."

I’ve been noticing something. It started, as these things often do now, on my phone. One of my favourite pop laments, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, kept resurfacing not as a song, but as a dance: a viral clip of dozens of young bodies in retro office‑casual dress, swirling and lunging in tight formation across a pastel‑toned courtyard. The choreography by Netherlands-based CDK Company was sharp but not presentational, massed yet curiously intimate, as if a crowd scene from an old Hollywood musical had slipped into 2020s streetwear and discovered contemporary release technique. I watched it over and over, wondering: what am I looking at here? A music video? A fashion film? A new kind of ensemble dance built for the camera rather than the stage?

New from Criterion: Unforgettable Women

Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

When David Lynch premiered his TV series Twin Peaks in 1990, no one had ever seen anything like it: a surrealist teen soap opera, Peyton Place or Splendor in the Grass reimagined by René Magritte. His fans couldn’t get enough of it, and Lynch couldn’t get it out of his system. He kept the series going for two seasons (though he only directed half a dozen episodes). He filmed a prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, in 1992 – the year after he made Mulholland Drive – and rebooted the series in 2017. It was the last major project he worked on before he died last year.

Movies and the Other Arts: Sentimental Value, The Choral, Hamnet

Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinste in Sentimental Value. (Photo: Neon.)

The house that provides the key setting in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a real beauty – a late 19th-century Oslo domicile in a Norwegian style known as Dragonstil (“dragon style”) that looks like a candy house, built of dark blue wood with cherry trim and a gabled roof. (In real life it’s called Villa Filipstad and belongs to Lars Lillo-Stenberg.) Luxuriously lit by Kasper Tuxen Andersen, it’s the most gorgeous house at the center of a movie since the gracious country residence in Olivier Assayas’s 2008 Summer Hours, loaded with the art made and collected by Edith Scob’s uncle, which she leaves to her three grown children when she dies early in the film. That picture could also have been called Sentimental Value; like Trier’s it’s about legacy, but of a different kind. Sentimental Value is about a famous filmmaker, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who inherited the house from his aunt; she lived there after Borg’s mother, a Resistance fighter during the Second World War who was imprisoned and tortured by the SS, hanged herself in it. When Borg and his wife divorced, his wife got it in the settlement. His two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), identify it with their childhood and especially with their mother, a therapist who has recently died of cancer. We see in a flashback that as kids they used to listen to her sessions with her patients through an old stove that carried their voices up to the second floor. Gustav, now seventy, wants to make a comeback film in this house, and he’s anxious for Nora, a well-known actress, to play the lead, a woman he insists is not based on his mother but whose story bears significant resemblance to her. Borg plans to end the movie with the protagonist’s suicide, by the same means and even in the same room as his mother’s. (When he makes the dramatic claim that she’ll even kick aside the same chair his mother did, Agnes comments quietly to her sister that the chair that now occupies that room came from IKEA.)

A Double Life: Frank O’Hara’s Amazing Versatility

(Bloomsbury Books.)

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.”

--Frank O’Hara

Matthew Holman’s exhaustively researched and methodically written book, Frank O’Hara: New York Poet, Global Curator, manages to be not only a superlative biography of this gifted poet but also a revealing memoir of the heady times in which he lived, a detailed chronicle of the city he so loved, and a tender portrait of the important Museum of Modern Art that many people, myself included at first, did not realize counted him among its most effective ambassadors of contemporary visual art. This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that O’Hara undertook for MOMA in New York and abroad. The day after his premature death in 1966, The New York Times ran an ironic and slightly ambiguous headline: “Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator/Exhibitions Aide at Museum of Modern Art Dies – also a poet.” Also a poet? That strikes some of us as a surprise, since we felt it might well have read “Frank O’Hara, 40, NY poet dies—also a curator.”

Molière & Menotti

Clockwise from left: Amber Gray, Matthew Broderick, and David Cross in Tartuffe. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

As Tartuffe, the titular character of Molière’s most famous comedy, Matthew Broderick is so preternaturally calm that he barely seems to be breathing. Nothing unsettles him; without blinking an eye, he absorbs any threat to his power over Orgon – who takes him in, offers him his daughter in marriage and even makes Tartuffe his heir –and simply applies to it a nonsense logic that makes you think of the discourse in Through the Looking-Glass. Tartuffe is a scam artist who uses Christian piety as both a façade and a weapon to control the credulous – Orgon and his ridiculous mother, Madame Pernelle. Broderick takes Tartuffe’s cold-heartedness literally: he’s so unmoved that he might have the body temperature of a reptile. The text tells us that Tartuffe enjoys good food and sex, but even when Orgon’s wife Elmire, in an effort to expose him while her oblivious husband is watching from under the table, comes on to him, he responds greedily to her overtures but there’s no evidence in his face or his tone that she’s given him an erection. We’d swear there was nothing remotely human going on under those Puritan bangs if we didn’t see the way his machinations turn Orgon’s family’s lives upside down.