#1
Posted: 10/23/04 at 2:12am
Inspired by another thread, I decided to pull together a bunch of quotes by the most hateful, nastiest, meanest, racist, sexist, homophobic critic in the history of the American Theatre -- New York Magazine's curmudgeonly John Simon. He's belittled, dismissed and panned most of the great (and not-so-great) stage artists of the last half of a century to the point where it's almost a rite of passage for any up-and-comng performer, writer, director, designer etc to get "Simonized" on the way up the ladder to success.
New York Mag's archives only go back to 1998, so these excepts of his reviews are only from the last 6 years (he's been reviewing for many, many decades, though -- in one review of a revival of Streetcar from a few years back, he waxed poetic about the original 1947 production that he saw and remembered in detail).
I compiled quotes until I just couldn't take it anymore -- he's a brilliant writer, to be sure, but a bitter, horrible human being and it's impossible to read too many of his reviews without getting more than a little quesy:
The Bubbly Black Girl 7/10/2000
"Show-biz autobiographies have become just about the dreariest nonentertainments visited on us. They are even more alike than Tolstoy's spurned happy families. Although Kirsten Childs has denied that The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin is autobiography, a mere reading of her program bio gives the lie to that, her accomplishments being roles in four musicals and one movie. She has received five major awards for this project, for which she wrote book, music, and lyrics. And indeed, she is quite literally a triple threat, being equally untalented at all three."
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Jesus Christ Superstar 5/1/2000
"Don't assume you have seen the worst before experiencing the latest revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, a production so stillborn I defy God himself to resurrect it. The Australian director Gale Edwards, aiming the gospel story at young audiences, comes up with part Godspell, part Middle East Side Story. The time is mainly today, plus some Fascist Italy, nastily blood-smeared no-period Jews, East Village kids as apostles, and a Las Vegas Herod. The set is the abandoned pillars of a bridge connected by a freight elevator carrying actors up and down, while others keep climbing those pillars.
Judas is a spike-haired, black-leather blond, Mary Magdalene a vaguely biblical trollop, and Jesus a sandaled Armani Exchange model. As Glenn Carter plays him, he is practicing for a more important appearance at Madame Tussaud's wax museum. Only Tony Vincent's Judas shows both energy and vocal prowess, but why does he come back after hanging himself? Could the Almighty have mistaken him for Jesus? As Herod, Paul Kandel is a decrepit Miss America Pageant host reduced to camping it up in Vegas; Siegfried and Roy would consider his act de trop.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's orchestrations of his own music, staggering between ear-blasting and barely audible, attest to advanced self-hatred. Anthony Van Laast's choreography tries to be inconspicuous, but unfortunately does not succeed. Except for torturing Jesus more than necessary, and having him repeatedly roll across the floor like a human mop, surrounded by paparazzi and redundantly projected onto a giant screen, Gale Edwards's direction contributes little. The set designer's chief invention is a crucifix made of enough light bulbs to blind an entire audience to all but the worthlessness of this revival."
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The Ride Down Mt. Morgan 4/24/2000
"The bad is compounded by Patrick Stewart in the lead. One of the hammiest and (except in the eyes of Trekkies) most uncharismatic actors, Stewart struts, gloats, mugs, delivers his lines as if from a revivalist's pulpit, and clobbers us with his charmlessness and the obtuseness of those who recklessly, Treklessly star him"
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Aida 4/10/2000
"Elton John has concocted a score wherein everything sounds the same -- i.e., tuneless, without even enough theatrical savvy to make the particular tunelessness appropriate to the character who mouths it. For the first-act finale, though, he reached for something grander, "The Gods Love Nubia," a sort of hymn or anthem for Aida and her fellow Nubian slaves in an Egyptian internment camp, on whose evidence the gods don't give an old-fashioned rap for Nubia. The arrangers and orchestrators -- Paul Bogaev (who also conducts), Steve Margoshes, and Guy Babylon (slightly east of Suez) -- have supplied Sir Elton's music with a disco-from-hell beat that manages to make it, to coin a phrase, worse than it sounds. Tim Rice's lyrics, some of which I tried to take down but my hand balked, wallow, perfectly matched, in the same trough as the tunes.
Aida is Heather Headley, ex-lioness from The Lion King a tall, angular young woman whose acting consists of feral scowls, whose speaking voice is an ominous growl, and whose singing is a confrontational blend of bellowing and caterwauling. It appears that you can take the girl out of The Lion King but not the lioness out of the girl.
The Radames, Adam Pascal (formerly of Rent), boasts of not having had a single singing or acting lesson, which proves incontestable, and that he has ignored the Puccini and Verdi originals so as not to "taint his ideas" -- an unnecessary precaution, as he seems free from anything resembling thought. The supporting players, who might have made modest contributions, abstained -- perhaps from an excess of modesty.......
It is rumored that the true inspiration for Aida was Disney's search for an excuse to market a black doll. If it does not make Hadleyan sounds to frighten little children, it should be a huge success."
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The Torchbearers 3/13/2000
"as the supposedly piss-elegant Huxley Hossefrosse, Don Mayo gives the phrase "hold the mayo" a whole new meaning."
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Two Sisters and a Piano 3/6/2000
"When, some years ago, I saw Nilo Cruz's Dancing on Her Knees at the Public, it felt like the worst play ever. Cruz's latest, Two Sisters and a Piano, again at the Public, is a step forward; it feels like the second-worst play ever: the clumsiest, often unbelievable, linguistically barren, and generally derivative melodrama. If the subject were not Castro's Cuba, Cruz not a Cuban-American, and affirmative action not alive and well in the theater, this claptrap would never have been mounted.
It is passably acted by Adriana Sevan, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Gary Perez, but Paul Calderon, despite his name, is much more African-American than Hispanic. The fumbling director, Loretta Greco, absurdly has the cast speak with Spanish accents; Robert Brill's set, even on a shoestring, could have been less wretched. At least it is on a par with Nilo Cruz's writing."
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Look Back In Anger 11/1/1999 (which he admits leaving at intermission, yet still filed a review)
"Reg Rogers has his uses in some roles, but not as a leading man whose appeal must mitigate his obstreperousness. Where Jimmy should be taut and aquiver, Rogers is a crazed Jack-in-the-box, his excessive and exaggerated outbursts unrelieved by charm. There is something flabby and grotesque about him, his face, in intense moments, drooping into expressions that look painfully like stupidity. As Alison's trouble-making friend, Helena, Angelina Phillips contributes her own brand of annoying smugness. Enid Graham, as Alison, looks confoundedly British but, like the others, manages the accent only with certain intermittencies. The set by Narelle Sissons, a designer whose chief virtue appears to be cost-saving, is wrong in more ways than I can enumerate, and Jo Bonney's staging is, when not overheated, pedestrian."
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Tartuffe 9/6/1999
"I have had my bad times at the Shakespeare Festival in Central Park: I have been bored, annoyed, disgruntled, and exasperated. But it remained for Mark Brokaw's production of Tartuffe to make me leave at intermission disgusted. Molière wrote a high comedy in exquisite verse; Richard Wilbur magically transmuted it into equally lovely English dramatic poetry. What Brokaw, who has shown great skill with contemporary plays both comic and serious, gives us is the lowest kind of farce, performed by actors, some of whom can do much better, carrying on like vulgar mountebanks, if not, worse yet, schoolchildren imitating vulgar mountebanks.
Every conceivable offense against wit, style, taste, and common sense is perpetrated here in the rankest fashion, with a lack of period sense, despite the period costumes, that only church-mouse-poor judgment can muster.......
The ingénue, Mariane, is played by Danielle Ferland, who has a chubby, pug-nosed face and a high-pitched, faintly Dogpatchy voice, and outpouts a pouter pigeon. As the smart, witty maid, Dorine, Mary Testa has an even shriller voice with which to belabor our hearing, turning our eardrums into blackboards across which she runs her words like fingernails. She hams for all her girth is worth, rolls her eyes like runaway billiard balls, and gives new dimensions to the notion of obnoxiousness........
Christopher Duva, as Valère, Mariane's lover, seems to have just drifted in from the nearest gay bar, and often sulks and postures like a constipated gazelle. Charles Kimbrough plays Orgon as a senescent halfwit, with a ludicrously mincing walk, a preposterous puppet-show voice, and a gaze that cannot quite choose between squinty and bug-eyed. Most embarrassing is Dylan Baker's Tartuffe, leering and stridulous, oozing smarminess too rancid to fool anyone at Orgon and comic-book lechery at Elmire that should reduce any woman to giggles.........
Tawdry yet simplistic costumes by Jess Goldstein, adequate but unresourceful décor by Riccardo Hernández (an eavesdropper must emerge from an improbable trapdoor), and overamplified pseudo-baroque music by John Gromada compete for our inattention. Brokaw's staging does the rest. Only Dana Ivey, as the old scold Pernelle, is persuasive, so that a character whose departure we can hardly wait for in other productions here leaves all too soon, taking Molière with her........"
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Taming of the Shrew 7/19/1999
"Yet as Katherina, the wonderful Allison Janney is wrenchingly miscast. Looking most of the time like Janet Reno on a bad-hair day, and acting as sexy, she makes Petruchio's motives seem purely venal."
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bash 7/12/1999
"The best work comes from Calista Flockhart, whose timings and inflections are unerringly on target, no matter what preposterous demands are inflicted on her. Still, if your reason for going is not so much relish of nastiness as wanting to see Ally McBeal in the flesh, be forewarned: There is very little flesh on dem bones."
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Ain't Nothin But The Blues 5/17/1999
"I was particularly taken with the two white, middle-aged, middle-class women behind me clapping after every number like crazy, usually also whooping like unhinged cranes, and shouting out "Oh, yeah!" to prove themselves possessors of soul. Talking to a savvy record-company publicist, I found that he, too, left after the first half. We racked our brains for someone who stayed on for the second to enlighten us about it. He finally came up with somebody, but she also loved the first half, which, we felt, disqualified her. Rabid p.c. is alive and well at Lincoln Center."
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Cider House Rules 5/17/1999
"Some of the others also squeeze out a bit from their fragmented roles, but I have a problem with Jillian Armenante. It may well be that Irving wrote Melony as a frightening freak -- he revels in creepiness and brutality -- but it is one thing to read about such a thing and quite another to have one's nose rubbed in it."
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Annie Get Your Gun 3/15/1999
"Miss Peters, however, is petite, cute, and cuddly, just an iota short (or long) of JonBenet Ramsey."
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Mineola Twins 3/1/1999
"Paula Vogel's not-quite-new The Mineola Twins (originally The Minnesota Twins) is neither top- nor bottom-drawer Vogel, though it is written in good part from her drawers. The mind and the crotch have harmoniously collaborated in this her most openly lesbian play, and what emerges is more than a campy piece in which three women play six parts, three of them male......
Joe Mantello, a passable actor, is rapidly developing into an unsurpassable director of a type of (usually homosexual) comedy, to which he brings steady sophistication, resourcefulness, and effervescence."
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The Misanthrope 3/1/1999
"It was probably a coup to secure Uma Thurman for Jennifer, and though she looks almost as good as Nicole Kidman, she bares even less, except for a certain lack of talent."
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You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown 2/15/1999
"The crowning fiasco, however, is the Charlie of Anthony Rapp. In the vastly overrated Rent, he was, in my view, the greatest irritant, but he was doubtless cast here as bait for the Rent fans. His straining to portray a lovable loser only emphasizes his basic smarminess. Hard as it is to define charm, I can define its opposite in two words: Anthony Rapp."
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The Captain's Tiger 2/1/1999
"So, you think you know what boredom in the theater is? You once saw two Frank Wildhorn musicals in one day? Well, yes; you do get points for that. You've sat through the entire Texas Trilogy in rapid, which is to say slow, sequence? Not bad, but still smallish potatoes. You spent a day at the Chinese opera? I feel for you, but you still have a way to go.
Tell me, however, that you have sat through the intermissionless 100 minutes of Athol Fugard's latest, The Captain's Tiger, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and I'll give you every drop of my sympathy, commiseration, and condolence, plus, if it were mine to give, the Purple Heart. You have drained the bitter cup to the dregs.
The end of apartheid may have brought happiness to multitudes, but for one man it spelled pure disaster. Alas, poor Athol! It took away what was his one subject -- a mighty one, to be sure, from which he wrested endless, often successful, variations. But apartheid apart, the man is reduced to purveying ditch water.......
Except for a few scattered crates and a blue-green backdrop, there is no set. Except for two dresses and a nightgown for Betty, there are no costumes. And except for 100 minutes of trivial and pointless palaver, there is no play.....
Fugard the director tries to compensate for Fugard the writer by goosing his cast into jigging (the usual sense) and bopping. All honor to Tony Todd as Donkeyman for relative underplaying. Felicity Jones has duly learned the right accent but, no doubt under heavy prodding, overacts relentlessly. Fugard the actor is determined to turn his country singlehandedly into a chief exporter of ham. He reads every line as if it had been given to him on Mt. Sinai by a burning bush, and capers about like an old satyr refusing to face that his nymph-chasing days are over."
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The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told 1/11/1999
"Worse yet is Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, which must have begun as a smartass idea a smarter person would have promptly dropped........The problem is not that the play is aimed almost exclusively at homosexuals, but that it is aimed at audiences, gay and straight, of the lowest common denominator."
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Swan Lake 10/19/1998
"The great prima ballerina Galina Ulanova described Swan Lake as "the most beautiful ballet you could imagine." But could you also imagine it as a danced homosexual melodrama with semi-nude male swans, a seedy nightclub scene, the outing of a closeted homosexual prince, a palace ball with a pistol-toting final shootout, an insane-asylum sequence, and similar absurdities?
You couldn't. But the choreographer Matthew Bourne could, in what is now, all too aptly, touted as Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. Not even poor, closeted-homosexual Pyotr Ilyich would claim it as his...........
The homosexualization of great heterosexual love stories proceeds apace. Romeo and Juliet has been converted into R&J with a four-schoolboy cast; there have been several all-male As You Like Its (and please, don't tell us again about Shakespeare using boy actors -- under duress); etc. Most of this, characteristically, of British origin. I have no objection to homosexual ballets, whether campy or not, as long as they are new and so conceived; they should not, like cuckoos' eggs, be smuggled into the nests of other birds, notably swans."
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Twelfth Night 7/27/1998
"Like the costumes, speech, and acting, it ranges meretriciously all over time and place, whether to capture the kudos of young, know-nothing audiences or out of sheer anomie, I lack the psychiatric credentials to determine.......
Paul Rudd's insufferable Orsino just manages to be, in his better moments, merely obnoxious. Lolling around like an affected lounge lizard, mouthing words as if they were pastilles, preening and posturing as if auditioning for a Calvin Klein ad, he confuses Illyria with Chippendale's.
As Viola, Helen Hunt is as bad as it gets. She wears a permanently befuddled expression, scrunches up her eyes as though under a barrage of grapefruits, and always leads with her head as if to butt her lines into an enemy goal. Her delivery is a tuneless singsong, and whereas some Violas have trouble passing for a boy, this one has problems reminding us she's a woman. No less ludicrous is the Olivia of Kyra Sedgwick, though here the heavy directorial hand is more guiltily evident. She behaves largely like a sideshow freak, with double-jointed contortions, unhinged crouches and leaps, grimaces unlimited, and fishwifely squeals and yelps -- and this, mind you, from a supposedly frosty, aristocratic beauty in unthawable mourning. In a production in which unlikely and painfully protracted smoochings proliferate, her near-rape of Sebastian takes the cake -- if not the ale as well."
New Yok Magazine's Theatre Archive -- John Simon's Reviews 1998 to the Present
New York Mag's archives only go back to 1998, so these excepts of his reviews are only from the last 6 years (he's been reviewing for many, many decades, though -- in one review of a revival of Streetcar from a few years back, he waxed poetic about the original 1947 production that he saw and remembered in detail).
I compiled quotes until I just couldn't take it anymore -- he's a brilliant writer, to be sure, but a bitter, horrible human being and it's impossible to read too many of his reviews without getting more than a little quesy:
The Bubbly Black Girl 7/10/2000
"Show-biz autobiographies have become just about the dreariest nonentertainments visited on us. They are even more alike than Tolstoy's spurned happy families. Although Kirsten Childs has denied that The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin is autobiography, a mere reading of her program bio gives the lie to that, her accomplishments being roles in four musicals and one movie. She has received five major awards for this project, for which she wrote book, music, and lyrics. And indeed, she is quite literally a triple threat, being equally untalented at all three."
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Jesus Christ Superstar 5/1/2000
"Don't assume you have seen the worst before experiencing the latest revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, a production so stillborn I defy God himself to resurrect it. The Australian director Gale Edwards, aiming the gospel story at young audiences, comes up with part Godspell, part Middle East Side Story. The time is mainly today, plus some Fascist Italy, nastily blood-smeared no-period Jews, East Village kids as apostles, and a Las Vegas Herod. The set is the abandoned pillars of a bridge connected by a freight elevator carrying actors up and down, while others keep climbing those pillars.
Judas is a spike-haired, black-leather blond, Mary Magdalene a vaguely biblical trollop, and Jesus a sandaled Armani Exchange model. As Glenn Carter plays him, he is practicing for a more important appearance at Madame Tussaud's wax museum. Only Tony Vincent's Judas shows both energy and vocal prowess, but why does he come back after hanging himself? Could the Almighty have mistaken him for Jesus? As Herod, Paul Kandel is a decrepit Miss America Pageant host reduced to camping it up in Vegas; Siegfried and Roy would consider his act de trop.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's orchestrations of his own music, staggering between ear-blasting and barely audible, attest to advanced self-hatred. Anthony Van Laast's choreography tries to be inconspicuous, but unfortunately does not succeed. Except for torturing Jesus more than necessary, and having him repeatedly roll across the floor like a human mop, surrounded by paparazzi and redundantly projected onto a giant screen, Gale Edwards's direction contributes little. The set designer's chief invention is a crucifix made of enough light bulbs to blind an entire audience to all but the worthlessness of this revival."
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The Ride Down Mt. Morgan 4/24/2000
"The bad is compounded by Patrick Stewart in the lead. One of the hammiest and (except in the eyes of Trekkies) most uncharismatic actors, Stewart struts, gloats, mugs, delivers his lines as if from a revivalist's pulpit, and clobbers us with his charmlessness and the obtuseness of those who recklessly, Treklessly star him"
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Aida 4/10/2000
"Elton John has concocted a score wherein everything sounds the same -- i.e., tuneless, without even enough theatrical savvy to make the particular tunelessness appropriate to the character who mouths it. For the first-act finale, though, he reached for something grander, "The Gods Love Nubia," a sort of hymn or anthem for Aida and her fellow Nubian slaves in an Egyptian internment camp, on whose evidence the gods don't give an old-fashioned rap for Nubia. The arrangers and orchestrators -- Paul Bogaev (who also conducts), Steve Margoshes, and Guy Babylon (slightly east of Suez) -- have supplied Sir Elton's music with a disco-from-hell beat that manages to make it, to coin a phrase, worse than it sounds. Tim Rice's lyrics, some of which I tried to take down but my hand balked, wallow, perfectly matched, in the same trough as the tunes.
Aida is Heather Headley, ex-lioness from The Lion King a tall, angular young woman whose acting consists of feral scowls, whose speaking voice is an ominous growl, and whose singing is a confrontational blend of bellowing and caterwauling. It appears that you can take the girl out of The Lion King but not the lioness out of the girl.
The Radames, Adam Pascal (formerly of Rent), boasts of not having had a single singing or acting lesson, which proves incontestable, and that he has ignored the Puccini and Verdi originals so as not to "taint his ideas" -- an unnecessary precaution, as he seems free from anything resembling thought. The supporting players, who might have made modest contributions, abstained -- perhaps from an excess of modesty.......
It is rumored that the true inspiration for Aida was Disney's search for an excuse to market a black doll. If it does not make Hadleyan sounds to frighten little children, it should be a huge success."
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The Torchbearers 3/13/2000
"as the supposedly piss-elegant Huxley Hossefrosse, Don Mayo gives the phrase "hold the mayo" a whole new meaning."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Two Sisters and a Piano 3/6/2000
"When, some years ago, I saw Nilo Cruz's Dancing on Her Knees at the Public, it felt like the worst play ever. Cruz's latest, Two Sisters and a Piano, again at the Public, is a step forward; it feels like the second-worst play ever: the clumsiest, often unbelievable, linguistically barren, and generally derivative melodrama. If the subject were not Castro's Cuba, Cruz not a Cuban-American, and affirmative action not alive and well in the theater, this claptrap would never have been mounted.
It is passably acted by Adriana Sevan, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Gary Perez, but Paul Calderon, despite his name, is much more African-American than Hispanic. The fumbling director, Loretta Greco, absurdly has the cast speak with Spanish accents; Robert Brill's set, even on a shoestring, could have been less wretched. At least it is on a par with Nilo Cruz's writing."
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Look Back In Anger 11/1/1999 (which he admits leaving at intermission, yet still filed a review)
"Reg Rogers has his uses in some roles, but not as a leading man whose appeal must mitigate his obstreperousness. Where Jimmy should be taut and aquiver, Rogers is a crazed Jack-in-the-box, his excessive and exaggerated outbursts unrelieved by charm. There is something flabby and grotesque about him, his face, in intense moments, drooping into expressions that look painfully like stupidity. As Alison's trouble-making friend, Helena, Angelina Phillips contributes her own brand of annoying smugness. Enid Graham, as Alison, looks confoundedly British but, like the others, manages the accent only with certain intermittencies. The set by Narelle Sissons, a designer whose chief virtue appears to be cost-saving, is wrong in more ways than I can enumerate, and Jo Bonney's staging is, when not overheated, pedestrian."
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Tartuffe 9/6/1999
"I have had my bad times at the Shakespeare Festival in Central Park: I have been bored, annoyed, disgruntled, and exasperated. But it remained for Mark Brokaw's production of Tartuffe to make me leave at intermission disgusted. Molière wrote a high comedy in exquisite verse; Richard Wilbur magically transmuted it into equally lovely English dramatic poetry. What Brokaw, who has shown great skill with contemporary plays both comic and serious, gives us is the lowest kind of farce, performed by actors, some of whom can do much better, carrying on like vulgar mountebanks, if not, worse yet, schoolchildren imitating vulgar mountebanks.
Every conceivable offense against wit, style, taste, and common sense is perpetrated here in the rankest fashion, with a lack of period sense, despite the period costumes, that only church-mouse-poor judgment can muster.......
The ingénue, Mariane, is played by Danielle Ferland, who has a chubby, pug-nosed face and a high-pitched, faintly Dogpatchy voice, and outpouts a pouter pigeon. As the smart, witty maid, Dorine, Mary Testa has an even shriller voice with which to belabor our hearing, turning our eardrums into blackboards across which she runs her words like fingernails. She hams for all her girth is worth, rolls her eyes like runaway billiard balls, and gives new dimensions to the notion of obnoxiousness........
Christopher Duva, as Valère, Mariane's lover, seems to have just drifted in from the nearest gay bar, and often sulks and postures like a constipated gazelle. Charles Kimbrough plays Orgon as a senescent halfwit, with a ludicrously mincing walk, a preposterous puppet-show voice, and a gaze that cannot quite choose between squinty and bug-eyed. Most embarrassing is Dylan Baker's Tartuffe, leering and stridulous, oozing smarminess too rancid to fool anyone at Orgon and comic-book lechery at Elmire that should reduce any woman to giggles.........
Tawdry yet simplistic costumes by Jess Goldstein, adequate but unresourceful décor by Riccardo Hernández (an eavesdropper must emerge from an improbable trapdoor), and overamplified pseudo-baroque music by John Gromada compete for our inattention. Brokaw's staging does the rest. Only Dana Ivey, as the old scold Pernelle, is persuasive, so that a character whose departure we can hardly wait for in other productions here leaves all too soon, taking Molière with her........"
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Taming of the Shrew 7/19/1999
"Yet as Katherina, the wonderful Allison Janney is wrenchingly miscast. Looking most of the time like Janet Reno on a bad-hair day, and acting as sexy, she makes Petruchio's motives seem purely venal."
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bash 7/12/1999
"The best work comes from Calista Flockhart, whose timings and inflections are unerringly on target, no matter what preposterous demands are inflicted on her. Still, if your reason for going is not so much relish of nastiness as wanting to see Ally McBeal in the flesh, be forewarned: There is very little flesh on dem bones."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ain't Nothin But The Blues 5/17/1999
"I was particularly taken with the two white, middle-aged, middle-class women behind me clapping after every number like crazy, usually also whooping like unhinged cranes, and shouting out "Oh, yeah!" to prove themselves possessors of soul. Talking to a savvy record-company publicist, I found that he, too, left after the first half. We racked our brains for someone who stayed on for the second to enlighten us about it. He finally came up with somebody, but she also loved the first half, which, we felt, disqualified her. Rabid p.c. is alive and well at Lincoln Center."
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Cider House Rules 5/17/1999
"Some of the others also squeeze out a bit from their fragmented roles, but I have a problem with Jillian Armenante. It may well be that Irving wrote Melony as a frightening freak -- he revels in creepiness and brutality -- but it is one thing to read about such a thing and quite another to have one's nose rubbed in it."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Annie Get Your Gun 3/15/1999
"Miss Peters, however, is petite, cute, and cuddly, just an iota short (or long) of JonBenet Ramsey."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Mineola Twins 3/1/1999
"Paula Vogel's not-quite-new The Mineola Twins (originally The Minnesota Twins) is neither top- nor bottom-drawer Vogel, though it is written in good part from her drawers. The mind and the crotch have harmoniously collaborated in this her most openly lesbian play, and what emerges is more than a campy piece in which three women play six parts, three of them male......
Joe Mantello, a passable actor, is rapidly developing into an unsurpassable director of a type of (usually homosexual) comedy, to which he brings steady sophistication, resourcefulness, and effervescence."
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The Misanthrope 3/1/1999
"It was probably a coup to secure Uma Thurman for Jennifer, and though she looks almost as good as Nicole Kidman, she bares even less, except for a certain lack of talent."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown 2/15/1999
"The crowning fiasco, however, is the Charlie of Anthony Rapp. In the vastly overrated Rent, he was, in my view, the greatest irritant, but he was doubtless cast here as bait for the Rent fans. His straining to portray a lovable loser only emphasizes his basic smarminess. Hard as it is to define charm, I can define its opposite in two words: Anthony Rapp."
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The Captain's Tiger 2/1/1999
"So, you think you know what boredom in the theater is? You once saw two Frank Wildhorn musicals in one day? Well, yes; you do get points for that. You've sat through the entire Texas Trilogy in rapid, which is to say slow, sequence? Not bad, but still smallish potatoes. You spent a day at the Chinese opera? I feel for you, but you still have a way to go.
Tell me, however, that you have sat through the intermissionless 100 minutes of Athol Fugard's latest, The Captain's Tiger, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and I'll give you every drop of my sympathy, commiseration, and condolence, plus, if it were mine to give, the Purple Heart. You have drained the bitter cup to the dregs.
The end of apartheid may have brought happiness to multitudes, but for one man it spelled pure disaster. Alas, poor Athol! It took away what was his one subject -- a mighty one, to be sure, from which he wrested endless, often successful, variations. But apartheid apart, the man is reduced to purveying ditch water.......
Except for a few scattered crates and a blue-green backdrop, there is no set. Except for two dresses and a nightgown for Betty, there are no costumes. And except for 100 minutes of trivial and pointless palaver, there is no play.....
Fugard the director tries to compensate for Fugard the writer by goosing his cast into jigging (the usual sense) and bopping. All honor to Tony Todd as Donkeyman for relative underplaying. Felicity Jones has duly learned the right accent but, no doubt under heavy prodding, overacts relentlessly. Fugard the actor is determined to turn his country singlehandedly into a chief exporter of ham. He reads every line as if it had been given to him on Mt. Sinai by a burning bush, and capers about like an old satyr refusing to face that his nymph-chasing days are over."
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The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told 1/11/1999
"Worse yet is Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, which must have begun as a smartass idea a smarter person would have promptly dropped........The problem is not that the play is aimed almost exclusively at homosexuals, but that it is aimed at audiences, gay and straight, of the lowest common denominator."
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Swan Lake 10/19/1998
"The great prima ballerina Galina Ulanova described Swan Lake as "the most beautiful ballet you could imagine." But could you also imagine it as a danced homosexual melodrama with semi-nude male swans, a seedy nightclub scene, the outing of a closeted homosexual prince, a palace ball with a pistol-toting final shootout, an insane-asylum sequence, and similar absurdities?
You couldn't. But the choreographer Matthew Bourne could, in what is now, all too aptly, touted as Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. Not even poor, closeted-homosexual Pyotr Ilyich would claim it as his...........
The homosexualization of great heterosexual love stories proceeds apace. Romeo and Juliet has been converted into R&J with a four-schoolboy cast; there have been several all-male As You Like Its (and please, don't tell us again about Shakespeare using boy actors -- under duress); etc. Most of this, characteristically, of British origin. I have no objection to homosexual ballets, whether campy or not, as long as they are new and so conceived; they should not, like cuckoos' eggs, be smuggled into the nests of other birds, notably swans."
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Twelfth Night 7/27/1998
"Like the costumes, speech, and acting, it ranges meretriciously all over time and place, whether to capture the kudos of young, know-nothing audiences or out of sheer anomie, I lack the psychiatric credentials to determine.......
Paul Rudd's insufferable Orsino just manages to be, in his better moments, merely obnoxious. Lolling around like an affected lounge lizard, mouthing words as if they were pastilles, preening and posturing as if auditioning for a Calvin Klein ad, he confuses Illyria with Chippendale's.
As Viola, Helen Hunt is as bad as it gets. She wears a permanently befuddled expression, scrunches up her eyes as though under a barrage of grapefruits, and always leads with her head as if to butt her lines into an enemy goal. Her delivery is a tuneless singsong, and whereas some Violas have trouble passing for a boy, this one has problems reminding us she's a woman. No less ludicrous is the Olivia of Kyra Sedgwick, though here the heavy directorial hand is more guiltily evident. She behaves largely like a sideshow freak, with double-jointed contortions, unhinged crouches and leaps, grimaces unlimited, and fishwifely squeals and yelps -- and this, mind you, from a supposedly frosty, aristocratic beauty in unthawable mourning. In a production in which unlikely and painfully protracted smoochings proliferate, her near-rape of Sebastian takes the cake -- if not the ale as well."
New Yok Magazine's Theatre Archive -- John Simon's Reviews 1998 to the Present
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
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"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
Updated On: 10/23/04 at 02:12 AM
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