Monthly Archives: December 2015

ROBERT JOFFREY’S THE NUTCRACKER: Christmas in the Shadow of Death

Chicago’s Auditorium Theater is the perfect setting to view Robert Joffery’s jarring, beautiful, and profound interpretation of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker danced brilliantly by his namesake company, and played wonderfully by the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra. Adler and Sullivan’s magnificent theater interior was meant “to express growth and decadence as the two great cyclic […]

December 11, 2015 – 5:30 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Dance, from Paul, History, Music, Poetry, Quotations, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology | Comments Off on ROBERT JOFFREY’S THE NUTCRACKER: Christmas in the Shadow of Death

THE HEIR APPARENT: A Matter of Style

Americans have always had a problem with affectation. Our first comedy, Royal Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), draws a sharp distinction between the emerging American style of Colonel Henry Manly and his pal Jonathan, and the Britisher, Mr. Billy Dimple and his servant, Jessamy, while acknowledging the bedrock importance of matters of style – national, ethnic, […]

December 5, 2015 – 9:41 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Books, from Paul, History, Quotations, Theater, Uncategorized | Comments Off on THE HEIR APPARENT: A Matter of Style

Kenneth Branaugh and Rob Ashford’s THE WINTER’S TALE arrives

The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare, the first offering of Kenneth Branaugh’s Plays at the Garrick, arrived on American movie screens last evening. After an interminable unedited film of the Garrick audience doing nothing but sitting, the production began, the American audience not as well-disposed as it had been forty minutes earlier when the unedited […]

December 1, 2015 – 8:42 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in from Paul, History, Mini-Review, Movies, Theater, Videos | Comments Off on Kenneth Branaugh and Rob Ashford’s THE WINTER’S TALE arrives