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Reviews
Broadway Play Review—Bess Wohl’s “Liberation”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 03 January 2026 22:05
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Liberation
Written by Bess Wohl
Directed by Whitney White
Performances through February 1, 2026
James Earl Jones Theatre, 138 West 48th Street, New York, NY
liberationbway.com
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| The cast of Liberation (photo: Little Fang) |
Playwright Bess Wohl has a happy talent for astutely observing families and individuals that are either broken or whole; from Make Believe to Grand Horizons, Wohl’s plays understand the constantly shifting push and pull animating such relationships. Her latest, Liberation, continues that steak—to an extent. Based on her mother’s story and cheekily subtitled A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember, Liberation is a way for Wohl to work out what her mother and other women of that generation did on behalf of women’s equality a half-century ago and whether it was all for naught.
The women of Liberation are from a small town in Ohio and meet in a school gym once a week in the slowly changing 1970s. The lead character is Lizzie, Wohl’s mother’s—and Wohl’s—stand-in, who toggles between both women while breaking the fourth wall to address the audience; she starts a discussion group of local women, not knowing who might show up. But several respond to her flyer, across a convenient spectrum—several white women (one a foreigner) and two Black women—and the play follows their ill-fitting first steps while they slowly gain confidence to have their voices heard in a protest about equal pay for equal work.
Alongside the 30ish Lizzie, there’s Margie, in her 50s; Susan, in her early 20s; Celeste, a Black woman in her late 30s; Isidora, an Italian woman around 40; Dora, also in her 20s; and Joanne, a Black woman in her early 30’s. After an initial thawing-out period, they start trusting one another by nudging others to take control of their own situations, whether it’s Margie belatedly realizing her lengthy marriage to a typical caveman of the time has been a sham or Dora leaving her secretarial job after her sexist boss bypasses her for a promotion in order to elevate another “neanderthal,” in Dora’s words.
Although the situations occasionally turn sitcomish or saccharine, Wohl’s truthful dialogue allows her women to speak frankly and with an incisive bite, including hilarious interactions like Margie bringing her husband’s beer to share with the others (”he’s not going to miss it,” she says) or Isidora’s frequent foul-mouthed outbursts. Only Lizzie seems more a symbol than an individual, and Wohl’s decision to include Bill (Lizzie’s future husband and the narrator’s future father) as the play’s lone male is ill-advised not only because the feminine/feminist dynamic is unbalanced whenever he appears but also because such a dramatic crutch is a contrived way to get Wohl’s parents onstage together.
There are other missteps, like Joanne standing in for Lizzie in scenes that explore more intimate moments in Wohl’s mother’s and father’s relationship but simultaneously keep them at a safe distance. And the humor can also get arch, as in the opening scene when the women wander into the gym and there’s an argument about whether the “B” that Lizzie wrote on the flyer to denote “basement” looks more like an “8,” causing Isidora to walk all the way upstairs looking for a non-existent high floor.
But the uniformly excellent performances of the entire cast—led by Susannah Flood as Lizzie, another in this terrifically personable actress’ series of thoughtful portrayals (including another in Make Believe)—coupled with Whitney White’s empathetic direction on David Zinn’s pinpoint unit set let Liberation be pretty satisfying as a personal and political memory play.
Orchestra of St. Luke’s Performs Beethoven at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 02 January 2026 14:56
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Fadi Kheir
At the splendid Stern Auditorium, on the night of Thursday, November 6th, I had the privilege to attend a wonderful concert—presented by Carnegie Hall—of masterworks by Ludwig van Beethoven, including several rarely heard in live performance, featuring the excellent Orchestra of St. Luke’s—admirably conducted by Raphaël Pichon—along with several impressive singers and the outstanding Clarion Choir led by its Director, Steven Fox.
The event started promisingly with the seldom rendered Geistlicher Marsch from the lesser-known incidental music for Friedrich Schiller’s play König Stephan, Op. 117, from 1811. This was followed by selections from the poetry of Walt Whitman, recited by Alex Rosen. Another pleasurable surprise was Friedrich Silcher’s Persicher Nachtgesang from 1846—here arranged by Robert Percival—after the magnificent Allegretto from Beethoven’s extraordinary Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92; Rosen sung the basso part along with mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor, tenor Laurence Kilsby and The Clarion Choir.
Two beautiful movements ensued from the equally undervalued incidental music from 1815 for the play, Lenore Prohaska, by Johann Friedrich Duncker: first the Romance sung by soprano Liv Redpath, and then the Melodrama. Taylor then recited an excerpt from “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou, whose autobiography was praised by literary critic Harold Bloom.
The highlight of the evening, inevitably, was its final work, a sterling account of Beethoven’s incredible Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125, completed in 1824, which employed all the soloists as well as the chorus. Most of the marvelous initial movement—marked Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso—which opens mysteriously, and seemingly inchoately, interrupted by forceful statements of the primary theme, is alternately lilting and propulsive; it finishes somewhat suddenly and emphatically. The succeeding, often exhilarating and sometimes playful Scherzo—its tempo is Molto vivace—is the most transumptively Mendelssohnian of the movements and it too has a driving rhythm and ends abruptly; the contrasting Trio section has an almost pastoral quality. Like many of the composer’s lyrical slow movements, the one in this piece, an Adagio molto e cantabile, contains some of its most heavenly music and concludes relatively quietly. In the glorious Finale, after what Richard Wagner described as a “fanfare of terror,” the score has a tentative quality until the stirring statement of the famous theme setting Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem, the “Ode to Joy,” whereupon the basso enters; it closes triumphantly.
The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.
December '25 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 18 December 2025 04:20
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theaters/Streaming Releases of the Week
Blue Moon
(Sony Classics)
Ethan Hawke throws himself into playing Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart—one-half of the immortal team of Rodgers and Hart, creators of such indelible musicals as Babes in Arms and Pal Joey—in Richard Linklater’s mostly inert biopic that concentrates on one day in Hart’s life, the opening night of Oklahoma, the first collaboration of Hart’s former partner Richard Rodgers with Oscar Hammerstein II.
Set at the venerable theater restaurant Sardi’s, the film has a certain interest for musical theater fans (especially when a young Stephen Sondheim, a protégé of Hammerstein, appears), but Robert Kaplow’s script tries to cram too much into its single setting, taking away from its focus on Hart, who would be dead a few months after this night. Hawke does immerse himself poignantly in the songwriter’s messy personal life, and he’s the main reason to watch until the predictably tragic end.
(Neon)
Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s latest melodrama explores a fractured family, as film director Gustav returns home after his ex-wife Sissel’s death to tell his two adult daughters—Agnes, a wife, mother and historian; and Nora, a temperamental stage actress having an affair with a married colleague—with the news that he’s making a film (with famous American actress Rachel Kemp) about his mother’s torture as a Nazi resistance fighter leading to her suicide when Gustav was young.
The complications of family history rear their heads throughout, but Trier concentrates on too many loose ends, like standard-issue stage or on-set sequences that do little to illuminate matters. Stellan Skarsgård is perfectly cast as the boorish but boyish Gustav, Elle Fanning is an excellent Rachel and Renate Reinsve a fine Nora, but Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas steals each of her scenes as Agnes. Trier should have focused on her instead.
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
David Byrne’s American Utopia
(Criterion)
Director Spike Lee and cinematographer Ellen Kuras capture David Byrne’s groundbreaking 2019 Broadway show combining music and movement in exhilarating fashion, centered on Byrne’s unique stage presence, a savant leading his congregation in the holy gospel of song, with Annie-B Parson’s expressive choreography and Bob Sinclair’s inventive lighting visually complementing Byrne’s songs—from early Talking Heads to his recent solo material—accompanied by a dozen musicians, singers and dancers.
Criterion’s new release comprises a 4K disc of the film, which looks and sounds immaculate; and two Blu-ray discs of the film and two extras: a 55-minute documentary about the show featuring Byrne, Kuras, Parson, and Sinclair, and a short Byrne and Lee conversation, socially distanced, from 2020.
(Warner Bros)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature, made in 1997, is now considered a classic—unaccountably, in my view; this shrill, cartoonish, shallow look at the L.A. porn scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s fails as both a satire of and affectionate tribute to its dim denizens.
In a cast of banal caricatures, Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds come off best; following his auspicious debut Hard Eight, this overstuffed would-be epic is the first of similar films that have dotted Anderson’s career—Magnolia, The Master, Licorice Pizza, One Battle After Another—but I realize I’m in the minority. It all looks great in 4K; extras include commentaries by Anderson and by the cast, American Cinematheque Q&A and deleted scenes.
Blu-ray Release of the Week
Maria Roumagnac
(Icarus Films)
Two legends of the silver screen—Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin—appeared for the only time together in French director Georges Lacombe’s doomed soap-operaish romance between a shop owner very popular with men and a working-class building contractor, whose jealousy over her sexually adventurous past (and present) pushes him over the edge tragically.
Despite the stiffness of the characterizations and the dialogue—especially in the climactic court sequence—the onscreen chemistry between Dietrich and Gabin more than compensates. The restored 1946 B&W film looks ravishing on Blu.
Nicola Porpora—Polifemo
(Chateau de Versailles)
Italian composer Nicola Porpora (1686-1768) wanted to challenge reigning opera genius George Frideric Handel at his own game in London, and the result was this 1735 Baroque epic romance populated by the goddess Galatea, the Cyclops, and ordinary men including Ulysses, whose appearance presages a conflict between the gods and the mortals.
This live performance from Versailles in 2024 is colorfully over-the-top both vocally and visually; it’s too bad that it’s only a DVD instead of superior sharpness of a Blu-ray. Still, it’s nice to have a visual record of this performance, along with three CDs housing the audio recording.
Broadway Musical Review—“The Queen of Versailles” with Kristin Chenoweth
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 14 December 2025 22:27
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Queen of Versailles
Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, book by Lindsey Terrentino
Directed by Michael Arden; choreographed by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant
Performances through December 21, 2025
St. James Theater, 246 West 44th Street, NY
queenofversaillesmusical.com
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| Kristin Chenoweth in The Queen of Versailles (photo: Julieta Cervantes) |
Proof that lightning does not strike twice, the latest Stephen Schwartz musical starring Kristen Chenoweth already posted its premature closing date on Broadway, while an earlier collaboration you might have heard about, Wicked, keeps going. But The Queen of Versailles is a cautionary tale for collaborators about what not to do when creating a Broadway musical.
It’s to Schwartz’s credit to try something original, and the story of Jackie Siegel, as seen in the eponymous 2012 documentary film directed by Lauren Greenfield, certainly qualifies. (Has there been another Broadway musical based on a documentary?) Greenfield’s film explores Jackie’s and ultra-rich husband David’s conspicuous consumption with both sympathy and bemusement, something difficult to finesse in a big-budget stage musical.
So Lindsey Ferrentino’s book and Schwartz’s songs try and have it both ways. We root for Jackie as she lucks into getting rich after some bad decisions, but as she and David start to throw around their money on a mansion nicknamed Versailles, it becomes increasingly difficult to spend time with them, especially since David is so heartless a millionaire villain, and F. Murray Abraham plays him as a comic caricature.
Chenoweth, on the other hand, remains enjoyable and funny, which makes Jackie less nuanced and, when she’s in financial and personal doldrums—the 2008 recession brings mansion construction to a halt, then her teenage daughter Victoria commits suicide—there’s a gaping dramatic hole that no amount of teary songs—including the Act I finale, “This Is Not the Way,” which Chenoweth carries effortlessly—can fill.
This might have worked shorter, making Jackie’s roller-coaster ride faster. Instead, it lumbers around for a bloated 2-1/2 hours, with sympathy gone and dramatic comeuppance obvious. Even appearances Louis XIV to make explicit the parallels between the Versailles of the 17th and 21st centuries are less amusingly pointed as they recur.
Needless to say, director Michael Arden’s slick staging can’t reconcile the inherent messiness of the subject and Schwartz’s and Terrentino’s treatment, while the first-rate trappings—Dane Laffery’s clever sets and video design, Christian Cowan’s tongue-in-cheek costumes, Natasha Katz’s brilliant lighting—only obscure the dramatic emptiness.
Chenoweth, of course, dominates any show she’s in, but that only shows up the rest of the cast. Abraham’s David has a few amusingly nasty moments and Nina White’s Victoria has the needed pathos, but they are shunted aside by the hurricane at the center. Even though Chenoweth gives it her all, she can’t save The Queen of Versailles from being guillotined.
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