City of Smoke

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. Read More

[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 happened to a great artist, we could understand his genius. The play, which Lincoln Center is presenting at the Golden Theater, is set in the period from 1873 to 1876 and concerns the relationship between van Gogh and the inhabitants of a house in South… Read More

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 Read More

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 of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first-ever collaboration, arrives at the Gershwin looking strangely like a revival you might have expected to see at the Paper Mill Playhouse ten or fifteen years ago. It’s anxious to be liked but charmless, imitative rather than innovative or inventive, and very much of a piece with the poster art advertising… Read More

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 Read More

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. Read More