It’s impossible to watch the new multimedia spectacle Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica without thinking of Philip Glass. That Terra Nova is being performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for its New York premiere only heightens this comparison, as BAM has been presenting Glass’ work for decades. Quite simply, Terra Nova aims to do for [...]

Ballet Hispanico recently crossed a milestone this summer when Tina Ramirez, who founded the company in 1970, stepped down as artistic director. The current season at the Joyce Theater (through Dec 13) was put together by Eduardo Vilaro, who took over as AD, and the early signs are promising. The company’s repertory is surprisingly well-rounded [...]

They’re probably the only ones in New York for whom downsizing feels like a step up in the world: the twenty-somethings of Avenue Q. Princeton, Kate Monster and the rest of the Avenue Q crew are six years older now since they debuted on Broadway back in 2003 and yet they’re still struggling to make [...]

I’ve been obsessively listening to “The Hounds of Winter,” one of the tracks on If on a Winter’s Night, Sting’s latest CD, a winter-themed album. The song isn’t new—it first came out more than a decade ago on Sting’s Mercury Falling—but it’s a superb new arrangement that pulls several excellent instrumentalists into the mix, including [...]

It’s been a rough year for Eugene O’Neill.  First his 1925 drama, Desire Under the Elms, was a substantial flop on Broadway.  Despite an interesting cast (including Brian Dennehy and Carla Gugino) the play was bizarrely directed—and heavily edited—by Robert Falls and it closed early, with some performances (like the one I attended) more than [...]

We should thank our lucky stars that Tim Burton (b. 1958) doesn’t seem to be a compulsive cleaner, otherwise we might not be able to see the wide range of his drawings and doodles—from recent to back when he was just a kid, predating the several years he spent at Disney—that are part of MOMA’s [...]

Amazing how Bill T. Jones’ work looks and feels as fresh as ever in his company’s 25th year. Serenade/The Proposition, at the Joyce through last Sunday, takes inspiration from Abraham Lincoln, whose bicentennial approaches. The performance combines Jones’ elegant choreography, spoken text, and live chamber orchestra and singer in a rich, luminous hour-long work. At [...]

Robert Wilson’s brand of theater art was seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as early as 1969.  Forty years after his debut there, Wilson’s work returned to BAM this month with a vivid of Heiner Muller’s Quartett, a 1981 reworking of the 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses.  It opens with an almost 10-minute long [...]

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, at the Whitney through January 24, 2010, doesn’t feel like a museum exhibition. It feels more like several gallery shows in one place at the same time—in a good way. Many solo museum shows can be overwhelming, or hinge around some giant work/s that skew the scale of the rest [...]

Last night I finally had a chance to hear David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion. The piece is a Carnegie Hall commission that had its world premiere in 2007 with Paul Hillier’s four-member Theatre of Voice. If you were lucky enough to catch The Little Match Girl Passion premiere at Carnegie or have listened [...]