City of Smoke » Mimi Kramer-Bryk

Confessions of a Theme Whore

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:33:49 +0000

It's a big relief to me that the television season has drawn to a close---particularly that there will be no new episodes of House to miss. I'd been having a terrible time since the show moved to Monday nights. I guess I'm not television conscious that early in the week

Susan Boyle and the Tigers of the Night

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:56:02 +0000

I’ve read several Google pages' worth of commentaries on Susan Boyle, the middle-aged Scottish woman whose April 11 performance of a song from Les Miserables on the U.K. version of "American Idol," "Britain's Got Talent," millions of people have watched on YouTube. So far, though, I've yet to encounter an article, essay, or blog post that touches on the aspect of the phenomenon that I found most fascinating and moving.

Furniture Polish

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Tue, 22 Jul 2003 20:15:00 +0000

What a piece of work is I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright's one-hander about the German collector and transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. And what a piece of work was its subject, who survived Nazism and Communism---two of the most repressive (and repressively anti-gay) regimes in modern history---and managed to keep faith with her chosen lifestyle while vastly improving her standard of living. Between 1942 and her death last year, von Mahlsdorf---born Lothar Berfelde---amassed a small fortune's worth of late-19th-century furniture and bric-a-brac, parlaying it into a private museum collection that she housed in the twenty-three-room, 18th-century manor house near East Berlin that she lived in for almost thirty years. There she ran a clandestine gay nightclub in the basement and with the fall of the Berlin Wall became a heroine of the newly resurgent gay community. Ultimately, she received the Order of Merit in recognition of her efforts and achievements in the field of furniture preservation.

Stalking Genius

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Sun, 08 Jun 2003 22:04:41 +0000

[From New York Press, April 8, 2003]

Vincent in Brixton at the Golden Theater

My Life With Albertine at Playwrights Horizons

Vincent in Brixton, Nicholas Wright’s sentimental biodrama about the year and a half that Vincent van Gogh spent living in London in his early twenties, is one of those plays that seem to believe that if we knew what [...]

Images of Elsewhere

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Thu, 20 Mar 2003 22:06:07 +0000

Waiting for the light to change at Broadway and 18th, the other night, I eavesdropped on a couple of guys who, like me, had just come from seeing Stephen Adly Guirgis's Our Lady of 121st Street at the Union Square Theater. They were talking about the unconventional relationship between the set and the action of the play, hardly any of which actually takes place in the space we spend the evening looking at---a large, institutional room that, depending on how the light is falling, can look like either a funeral parlor lobby

How Things Seem

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Sat, 08 Jun 2002 21:54:38 +0000

New York Press, November 6, 2001

Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things; Strindberg’s Dance of Death with Mirren and McKellen; Artistic disarray at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater

There’s some first-rate acting going on at the Promenade Theater, where Gretchen Mol is appearing with Paul Rudd, Frederick Weller, and Rachel Weisz in a new play by [...]

Oklahoma, Oh No!

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Tue, 09 Apr 2002 16:20:13 +0000

There’s a bright golden haze on the medder—and on just about everything else in Trevor Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma!—but it’s the hard, cold glint of lucre, not the burnished glow of harvest and renewal. This long-awaited production, which was hailed, when it opened four years ago at London’s Royal National Theatre, as a wholesale rethinking [...]

The Jew of Schmalta

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:16:07 +0000

Iwent to see the new Neil Simon play the other night. Oy, vhat an old-feshioned play! Even I don' remembah ven dey yoosta produce plays like dis. Dey's dis character in de show dat talks joost like dis on account he's supposta be Jackie Mason de stend-up comic. He talks like dis all evenink long. So if dis don' mek you leff, don' go see de show---because this is about as funny as it gets. 45 Seconds from Broadway is set at the Cafe Edison, the coffee shop in the lobby

Everybody’s Story

Mimi Kramer-Bryk — Sat, 08 Jan 2000 15:37:02 +0000

Anumber of shrinks of my acquaintance were heard to express impatience with Jennifer Melfi M.D. in the week before New Year's, when HBO rebroadcast the first thirteen episodes of The Sopranos, preparatory to this Sunday's launch of the new season. Dr. Melfi, therapist to Tony Soprano, is one of the central figures in the wildly popular series about a present-day Mafia capo who seeks counseling when the personal and professional pressures of his life becomes too great for him to bear. Dr. Melfi is played by Lorraine Bracco, which is an interesting bit of casting.