‘The Gospel at Colonus’
“The Gospel of Colonus” has built a fervent following over the past four decades or so — its number “How Shall I See You Through My Tears?” even popped up in the cult-favorite movie “Camp” — so expectations are running high for the new revival at Little Island in Manhattan (through July 26). Those not in New York or who couldn’t get a ticket to Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s new staging can check out a production from the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, from 1985, that’s streaming on YouTube. This superlative take on Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s gospel retelling of Sophocles’ tragedy of Oedipus boasts a powerhouse cast, including Morgan Freeman, Jevetta Steele and Robert Earl Jones (James’s father), who went on to Broadway with the show three years later. The score, which features some of the funkiest, most rousing numbers ever heard in a musical, surges to vivid life. Tip: Blast this at full volume.
‘Frozen: The Hit Broadway Musical’
The stage version of the animated megahit movie “Frozen” played just two years on Broadway (a short spell by Disney standards), but this newly available capture of the West End production may well kick-start renewed interest in the United States. For the stage version, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez expanded their score with a dozen new songs — my favorite is the catchy duet “What Do You Know About Love?” between Anna (Laura Dawkes) and Kristoff (Jammy Kasongo). The movie and the show share a bone structure, but they are different animals, with the show able to spend more time on the complicated bond between the sisters, Anna and Elsa (an excellent Samantha Barks). Michael Grandage’s staging captures the story’s supernatural side well, and, let’s face it: We’re all going to watch Elsa’s eye-popping costume change during “Let It Go” a million times, wondering how they pulled it off.
‘A Summer Day’
Stream it from the Wilma Theater.
The work of the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, remains maddeningly elusive on American stages. Double kudos, then, to the Wilma Theater, in Philadelphia, for not just producing his “A Summer Day” but for making it available for streaming through July 27. In his review of the New York premiere in 2012, The New York Times’s Ben Brantley described the play as “a quietly brutal little work that turns a romantic cliché into a sentence of existential doom (or freedom, depending on your mind-set).” The show is fairly representative of Fosse’s work: nonlinear and eschewing traditional narrative, relying on repetitiveness and silences. The Wilma’s co-artistic director Yury Urnov took the helm for this version, with Krista Apple playing the Older Woman who is caught in her memories, as if stuck in a time loop. “While the play is about grief and loss, it’s anything but sad or sentimental,” Urnov wrote in his program note. “On the contrary, it’s vivid, energized and often funny.”
Artifacts’ Downtown Performance series
For decades, the cultural historian Steven Watson has been documenting the experimental and queer arts scenes under the umbrella term Artifacts. Watson and the filmmaker William Markarian-Martin have made a treasure trove of interviews available on the Artifacts site, and a partnership with N.Y.U. Skirball highlights the Downtown Performance series. To hear the director and Mabou Mines co-founder JoAnne Akalaitis, the playwright and director Richard Foreman, or the conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady talk about their work, often with refreshing frankness, is to be transported back to the era when the avant-garde thrived below 14th Street. These people are great raconteurs, as when the theoretician, director and writer Richard Schechner reminisces about his boundary-breaking “Dionysus in 69,” which actually played out of town, too. “Every place we went, it was notorious or glorious or both,” he says.
‘Mephisto’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms (free on Hoopla).
Istvan Szabo’s film, which won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1982, follows the rise of an ambitious actor from provincial Hamburg to the bright lights of Berlin’s prestigious stages — as, in parallel, the Nazis seize power. When he’s getting started, Hendrik Höfgen (the brilliant Klaus Maria Brandauer) is a firebrand who sympathizes with Communists and sees theater and politics as inextricably linked. As success takes hold, however, he starts arguing that he is, above all, an actor, and his responsibility is only to his craft. But politics catch up to everybody in early-1930s Germany, and the country’s new rulers extend their control over every facet of society, including the arts. If anything, the far right and the far left both understand the importance of culture when it comes to controlling hearts and minds. As his friends and colleagues flee the country (or meet a worse end), Hendrik is left kowtowing to the fascist thugs who admire his portrayal of the devil in a production of “Faust.” The actor is the one who sold his soul for glory, though.
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