Smoke and Mirrors: City of Smoke

On Mamet's Oleanna

By William Bryk, on October 13, 2009

In the autumn of 1992, when the original off-Broadway production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna” was about to open in New York, my wife, Mimi Kramer, then a drama critic for The New Yorker, was asked by the magazine’s new editor, Tina Brown, to write a puff piece about the play for Brown’s first issue. Mimi had been working for a couple of years on a book about the school of acting that Mamet and the actor W.H. Macy had founded in Vermont in the 1980s. Mamet was not interested in being interviewed any more than Mimi was interested in interviewing him; so she spent the next several months turning Read More

Confessions of a Theme Whore

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on May 20, 2009

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 Read More

Susan Boyle and the Tigers of the Night

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on April 20, 2009

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. Read More

Comedy Lite

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on March 4, 2009

I picked up a copy of Yasmina Reza's Life (x) 3 a couple of days after seeing the play at Circle in the Square and was flabbergasted to discover that the opening scene between John Turturro and Helen Hunt is actually funny. Read More

Artificial Affect

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on February 16, 2009

Ifound myself checking up on the parts of a horse the other day. It was after the Daily News had carried an AP story about some new prehistoric art found in the Perigueux region of France—engravings thought to predate the Lascaux cave paintings by 10,000 years. It was a burial Read More

Imagining Ahab

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on February 14, 2009

Next Tuesday, as part of a weekly movie series at Symphony Space, John Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick will be shown in a double bill with John Ford's The Searchers. The date is November 21, and I keep wondering whether Isaiah Sheffer, the artistic director of Symphony Space, knew when he made up the program that he was scheduling Moby Dick for the 180th anniversary of the incident that probably inspired it, give or take a few hours: the sinking of a Nantucket whaler by an enraged sperm whale Read More

Song Recycle

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on February 12, 2009

For Pete's sake, why all the fuss about the Baz Luhrmann La Boheme? You'd think that no one had ever thought of updating classical opera before, or casting "realistically" trim and youthful romantic leads. The production, currently at the Broadway Theater, which brings the action forward to the 1950s, opened earlier this month to reviews that ranged from the rhapsodic to the studiously excited. Only Michael Feingold in the Village Voice had the taste and good sense Read More

Family Fare

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on February 10, 2009

Arecent encounter with the first half-hour or so of Jane Eyre, The Musical put me in mind of the 1857 murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell. (The connection won't immediately be apparent.) A friend with a professional interest in seeing the show had asked me along, and since she'd paid for the tickets and wanted to leave, we did--well before the act break--driven out by the inexorable staccato of the leading lady's enunciation. The show had not been exceptionally or unexpectedly appalling, but it made you realize that it's possible to get anything produced on Broadway these days, provided it has a child in it. Absolutely anything. People are desperate to get their offspring out of the house, and anything with a kid in it is considered family fare. This re-emergence of the child as live attraction may be a by-product of the current baby boom. But it has its roots, I think, in the Burdell affair and its aftermath. Read More

Junk Geniuses

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on February 10, 2009

Icame straight home from The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's three-character play about the Collyer Brothers (at the Gramercy Theater through May 12) and threw out all the plastic shopping bags that had been mounting up in the pantry closet. Then I went at the piles of newspapers waiting to be gone Read More

The New Drag (And Why It Matters)

By Mimi Kramer-Bryk, on January 30, 2009

In the 1999 film adaptation of An Ideal Husband that recently came out on video, there's a scene in which Lord Goring, the play's hero, attends the opening of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. All London seems to have turned out for the occasion, which ends with Wilde Read More

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