David Fox and Cameron Kelsall
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is sometimes called the American King Lear, which nods to themes of a father and his disappointing children… but I think it’s also Shakespearean in its sprawl and grandeur.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
Yet there remain some memories and impressions I know we’d both like to share—on a few stage performances, memorable in various ways, so how about one more roundup?
Shirley Booth‘s Amanda reminds us again of her astonishing range, and truly unique (yes, a word I hate, but I mean it here) ability to mix heartbreak and humor in the same breath.
More than any actor I’ve seen on stage or screen, John Malkovich communicates the essential ambiguity of the character.
The 1950 movie seems intent to turn the story into a screen romance, eliding or ignoring the play’s mournful tenor.
Bus Stop deals with uncomfortable questions of sex and longing, and it also examines a desire for human connection that often comes up short.
It is interesting to consider how strongly Inge focuses on women (mostly single or widowed) and sex, particularly from his position as a (closeted) gay man.
A theater-critic friend of my father once said that Laurence Olivier played American like it was a character choice.
Like many artistic homosexuals, I’ve been through an Altman phase, a Cher phase, a Sandy Dennis phase and a Karen Black phase, so you needn’t explain yourself to me.
There’s no way for any production of Suddenly Last Summer to completely avoid at least a whiff of camp.
Having just watched and written about the famous Actors Studio Three Sisters, it also feels right to turn now to The Cherry Orchard—Chekhov’s final play—in a production from the BBC.
To opera denizens, Terrence McNally is probably best known for Master Class, a fictionalized account of Maria Callas’s 1970s Juilliard master classes, which was a surprise hit on Broadway in the 1990s.
What we see here from Strasberg is frustratingly literal and drably conventional—it looks to me like he’s channeling a lot of received wisdom about how Chekhov should be staged and bringing almost nothing of his own to the process.
Time to stop being coy, I think. You and I had quite different takeaways on the show, didn’t we?
For a show set during the hardscrabble 1930s, very few of the performances give off an air of downtroddedness.
It’s difficult to discuss Unknown Soldier without considering the impact of legacy.
The fabulous Beth Malone is the Molly Brown of my dreams—forthright, bold, and a superbly gifted singer with just the right touch of country twang.
Upon its commercial release three weeks ago, Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of Cats garnered instant, near-universal scorn from audiences and critics alike.
Jagged Little Pill is as manicured as the kind of Stepfordian society the material supposedly rails against.
It’s not difficult to make an audience weep uncontrollably. But because it’s so easy, I think artists have a responsibility to not overuse that power.
Like any good gay theatergoers, we seek out Tennessee Williams revivals with the fervor of truffle-sniffing pigs.
When soprano Yihan Duan started to sing her aria, you could feel an almost electric charge that something special was happening.
The Philadelphia Orchestra’s opening night concert, for better or worse, was not a gala evening starring Plácido Domingo.
We’re two gay men, with 30-plus years between us, who went together to see the Broadway adaptation of Buz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!
