John Lahr News

ABSTRACT: THE THEATRE review of "The Starry Messenger." The writer compares Mark Williams , the lead character of Kenneth Lonergan's new play "The Starry Messenger", to a slow loris, an animal that survives in the jungle by playing dead.

In our pornographic age, it's hard to imagine that there was a time when people were better acquainted with the continent of Africa than with their own bodies.

The current West End production of Simon Bent's Prick Up Your Ears , inspired by the John Lahr biography of playwright Joe Orton and Orton's diaries, is to shutter Nov.

An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet caf. A stranger at the next table who has had enough.

Patrick Marber's "After Miss Julie" , a version of August Strindberg's gnarly, pathfinding 1888 tragedy about class division and desire, puts a new engine in an old chassis; the problem is internal combustion.

I've had my issues with him in the past, but when John Lahr is on, no one can touch him.

There's a lovely piece today in this week's The New Yorker by fave theater writer John Lahr on Horton Foote .

"Broke-ology" , by the talented thirty-yearold African-American playwright Nathan Lewis Jackson, belongs to the now familiar genre of family leave-takings. What Jackson lacks in poetry and in stagecraft he makes up for in compassion.

At the finale of the last "Hamlet" to be seen in New York , Fortinbras called for a hero's cannonade to honor the slain Prince of Denmark - "Go, bid the soldiers shoot" - only to have his lieutenant whip out a pistol and shoot Horatio.

An intriguing piece of casting for the new production of Prick Up Your Ears - written by Simon Bent and based on the diaries of Joe Orton and the John Lahr biography of the same name - which makes its way to the capital following its Brighton run.

Jez Butterworth's "Jerusalem," the hit of London's summer theatre season - which just closed at the Royal Court and which will probably be coming soon to a repertory theatre near you - is exceptional for one rabble-rousing, reckless character: Johnny Byron, the Sir Epicure Mammon of modern misrule, a swashbuckling waster and mythomaniac who is ...

The New York Post reports that famed critic and New Yorker scribe John Lahr has filed legal action against legendary Broadway star Elaine Stritch, for the work he did with her on the 2003 Tony Award-winning show, Elaine Stritch: AT LIBERTY.

A star of the Great White Way is a great big cheat, claims a distinguished drama critic.

"one of Broadway's biggest, brightest semi-stars," she smiles with cold teeth - has co-written, with Dick Scanlan, the excellent, well-titled "Everyday Rapture" . Scott expertly conveys the internal spiritual drama of an attractive, talented Midwestern Mennonite struggling to reconcile her upbringing with Broadway's Destiny of Me.

London's Royal Court Theatre has made this spring a Wallace Shawn season. In addition to showing Shawn's cult movies "My Dinner with Andre" and "Vanya on 42nd Street" , the theatre has staged his 1990 one-man show, "The Fever" , his 1985 play "Aunt Dan and Lemon," and Shawn's first new play in more than a decade, "Grasses of a Thousand Colors," in ...

Kazan on Directing, foreword by John Lahr, preface by Martin Scorsese, edited and with an introduction by Robert Cornfield, Knopf, 342 pages "The first auteur of the American theater" John Lahr calls Elia Kazan in the foreword to this book, "the first director to insist on having control of the entire production, the first to be billed above the ...

"To mount an all-black production of a 'Death of a Salesman' or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans," ...

With his latest production of West Side Story currently on Broadway and a new memoir just published, legendary writer-producer Arthur Laurents tells his good friend Charles Kaiser why he's never been able to tell a lie and why that sometimes gets him into trouble.

John Lahr has a nice piece in The New Yorker on the current Broadway performance of Waiting for Godot : As Pozzo, the sadistic master who controls Lucky with a whip and a long rope, John Goodman is a huge, startling figure.

Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," billed as "the laugh sensation of two continents," made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956.