Culture Watch

March 21, 2016

Early 1800s Mississippi Hoedown Hits and Misses

by Bruce Chadwick

The play "The Robber Bridegroom" is electric. For the most part, it is a fun show, but there is very little history in the historical show and it cries out for it.

March 14, 2016

Christie’s 1950s Mousetrap Still Slams Down Hard and with Gusto

by Bruce Chadwick

See The Mousetrap and catch a bit of history.

March 14, 2016

A 1960s Quandary: When Is a Boy a Girl Who Is a Boy?

by Bruce Chadwick

Anna Ziegler’s fine play shows everybody that our sexual world may be changing on the surface, but that it has always been changing – below the surface. "Boy" is a winner.

March 8, 2016

Story of Boxing Great Jack Johnson Scores TKO

by Bruce Chadwick

The play "The Royale" is an absorbing story, a mixture of history and sports and a scary look at a highly racist America in the middle of the Jim Crow era. It is full of hysteria and history and a study of a titanic black fighter in a world of sports dominated by white men.

February 29, 2016

Theater: White Cop Threw Black Teen Out of Window, or Did He?

by Bruce Chadwick

"Dead Dog Park," a scalding new play by Barry Malawar, highlights the seemingly never ending clashes between city police and the African American community in real life.

February 15, 2016

Why Ordinary Americans Can Torture Innocent People

by Bruce Chadwick

One of the most disturbing psychological experiments in American history was carried out by Yale psychology professor Stanley Milgram between 1961 and 1963. The true story of the Milgram experiments has been turned into a play, "Please Continue," and it is an absorbing and engaging play.

February 15, 2016

"A Bronx Tale: The Musical": The Movie About the Mob Is Now a Play

by Bruce Chadwick

Do we really need another mob story, though? Oh, yes. In America, we always need mob stories.

February 14, 2016

MLK Had Harry Belafonte. Black Lives Matter now Has Jay Z and Beyoncé

by Emilie Raymond

History’s repeating itself. In a good way.

February 8, 2016

Nice Study of Russian Dance Superstar Rudi Nureyev

by Bruce Chadwick

"Nureyev’s Eyes" is a loving portrait of a great star and a riveting story. You learn much about dance and about Russian history.

February 1, 2016

Dreaming of Red Pavilions in Eighteenth Century China (Review of a Play)

by Bruce Chadwick

"A Dream of Red Pavilions" is a solid adaptation of the novel, with a few bumps here and there, and gives audiences an interesting look at upper class family life in China nearly three hundred years ago.

February 1, 2016

Can Walt Whitman’s Nineteenth Century Poetry Save Today’s Teenagers?

by Bruce Chadwick

Throughout the play there is a lot of angst but less grass and little Whitman.

January 29, 2016

Thebes 466 BC vs. Baghdad, 2003 and a New Look at Sophocles and War

by Bruce Chadwick

Seamus Heaney’s play, based on Sophocles’ Antigone, is a solid and absorbing drama, a nice look at Greek history and a scalding indictment of the power madness of leadership everywhere and in all centuries.

January 22, 2016

The New PBS Series on the Civil War: An Interview with the Creator of "Mercy Street"

by Robin Lindley

Filmmaker and executive producer Lisa Wolfing explains what it was like to create a show for PBS about the nurses and doctors who served at a Union hospital during the Civil War.

January 20, 2016

“Mercy Street”: The Nearly Flawless New Series on PBS About the Civil War

by Kevin M. Levin

It’s the Civil War as the people who lived through it experienced it. And it’s superb.

January 20, 2016

The Angry Skeleton Crew Workers of Labor History

by Bruce Chadwick

A sharply written play full of deep and absorbing characters, "Skeleton Crew" is really just the latest chapter in labor history in which mega-corporations sometimes destroy the lives of tens of thousands of hard working American laborers.