161 stories by "James Wilson"
Singer and songwriter Nina Simone was a clarion voice of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In songs like "Mississippi Goddam" and "Old Jim Crow," Simone's words and music prov…
"Romance of the Three Kingdoms," the classic 14th century Chinese novel attributed to author Luo Guanzhong, is a sprawling epic that merges history, fiction and mythology. The book comprises…
The subtitle of Sarah Gancher's Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, currently running at the Vineyard Theatre (and in association with Geva Theatre Center), calls to mind a host of sitco…
The classic 1937 film, The Spanish Earth, is a fascinating marriage of art and propaganda. Filmed during the Spanish Civil War, the documentary captures scenes from actual battles and shows …
Last fall, the Museum of Broadway opened in Midtown Manhattan. For a hefty admission fee, individuals can meander through a series of interactive exhibits that creatively and wistfully evoke…
The set-up is almost as old as Hollywood itself: A woman announces to her family that she is abandoning her stultifying home life and is heading to California to be a glamorous and world-fam…
According to recent statistics, less than one percent of all Americans actively serve in the military. This means that most people living in the United States do not have any personal contac…
Philip Roth's 1995 novel "Sabbath's Theater" is a sprawling, ambitious work that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award. Arguably, it is also one of Roth's most…
The American musical theatre pantheon is teeming with cads, grifters and swindlers. Pal Joey's Joey Evans, Music Man's's Harold Hill, How to Succeed's J. Pierrepont Finch, and The Producers'…
"Things are not as they seem." This is both the subtitle and guiding mantra of Emergence, Patrick Olson's strangely captivating new show currently playing at Manhattan's Signature Center. (E…
Last year, New York's invaluable Mint Theater Company presented Chains, Elizabeth Baker's trenchant drama from 1909 about the apparent impossibility of having both a happy marriage and a ful…
Near the end of South, Florencia Iriondo's autobiographical show, the Argentina-born writer and performer explains, "That constant sense of nostalgia defines me more than any address can." N…
"Pay the Writer" could be this summer's rallying cry for the striking members of the Writer's Guild of America, but it is also the name of Tawni O'Dell's new play about a celebrated writer's…
Although Toros, Danny Tejera's play currently running at Second Stage's McGinn/Cazale Theater, takes place in a posh suburb in Madrid, the twenty-something characters are metaphorically at s…
For basketball aficionados, the all-time great players"LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and others on the deified short list of the NBA pantheon"are not mere mortals. They are su…
Although largely forgotten today, disc jockey and performance promoter Alan Freed is an important figure in popular music history. He is credited with standardizing the term "rock and roll,"…
"Great American"not great president." This is how a poll of 75 historians damningly characterized Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1962, not even two years after he left office. Richard Hellesen's on…
The narrator and main character of Tori Sampson's This Land Was Made, now running at the Vineyard Theatre, identifies herself as a griot. Simultaneously storytellers, poets, and living archi…
In lieu of a playbill or the increasingly more ubiquitous fliers containing a digital QR code, audiences attending Bernarda's Daughters, Diane Exavier's elegiac play currently running at the…
Construction noise, profanity-shouting pedestrians, non-stop emergency-vehicle sirens, and the booming music of pedicabs can certainly pose an obstacle for individuals hoping to find quiet s…
"For never was a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." Thus concludes one of Shakespeare's best-known and most-performed plays. In the boisterous, gag-filled production pres…
"You think things are one way, but they can be another way." This reversal of expectations is a recurring theme throughout Michael Cruz Kayne's Sorry for Your Loss, the new one-person show p…
There have been numerous hit Hollywood animated family films that include serious or dramatic content and some that even feature death. In the Walt Disney classic Bambi, the young deer must …
The press materials for Erika Dickerson-Despenza's new play at the Public Theater request that the title, shadow/land, be documented using lowercase letters. In the first thirty minutes or s…
As modernist playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw demonstrated, theatre has the power to rattle the cultural consciousness and shine the spotlight on pressing contemporary social and political…
