STAGES & SCREENS

When the Metropolitan Opera chose to open its 2025-26 season with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay , they must have felt it was a risky move. The brand-new, sweeping, three-hour adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Jewish comic book makers who invent a superhero to fight the Nazis in World War Two had only played at Indiana University, as the co-producing LA Opera had canceled what was to be its debut run due to financial constraints. The top brass decided not even to give it a slot in the “Met in HD” series, which broadcasts the operas in movie theaters around the world. So when The New York Times responded to its grand opening with the headline “A ‘Kavalier & Clay’ Opera Doesn’t Meet Its Moment,” it seemed like a potentially serious hit to the Met’s recent ambitious, financially perilous effort to introduce as many as six new operas each season. However, after that review the full multi-week run of the opera nearly sold out every night...

In his later plays Tom Stoppard almost always included a character who turns from a life of frivolous tomfoolery, of one sort or another, comes face to face with evil in the world, and recognizes his responsibility to become the change he wishes to see. That was in fact the trajectory of Stoppard’s writings themselves. He went from being a writer who avoided writing about politics — someone who said his favorite line in literature was “I’m a man of no convictions—at least, I  think  I am” — to being someone who wrote a nine-hour trilogy of plays on the origins of Russian socialism, and for whom almost every new play for two decades ended up carrying some kind of political theme. I loved this change in Stoppard as much as I’d loved what he’d written before the transformation. To hyperbolize as one does in the face of a loss, Stoppard’s writings were in a small way the spur for such an intellectual awakening in me as well. As young theater kids, my brother and I were intere...

I was surprised when a Google search for a ranking of Toni Morrison’s novels came up empty. Only Forbes magazine advertised “The Greatest Toni Morrison Books, Ranked and In Order,” but it turned out this meant they had listed her books in chronological order. This seems a major gap for the Internet, so I read all 12 of her fiction books in less than 30 days and have compiled my own ranking. This diverges from the subject “Stages and Screens” but is a follow-up to my last post, on why more Morrison novels have not been adapted dramatically . I should note that since finishing the novels, I have found one other blogger who ranked Morrison’s early novels. But I still haven’t found anyone who has ranked them all. My rankings are strictly my personal preference. Here they are.       1. Beloved (1987). This is a somewhat boring choice, perhaps, as Beloved is widely considered Morrison’s masterpiece, and she spent a fair amount of time resisting any notion that th...

The New York Times on March 11 of this year ran a story titled “Netflix is gobbling up world literature. What could go wrong?” The sub-headline read, “The streamer keeps mounting lavish adaptations of beloved novels – and making them all feel like just more Netflix.” That headline made me wonder: With that flood of novel adaptations underway, why hasn’t there been more than one film or TV adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison? She has been called “one of the greatest authors in American history,” and “one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial modern authors,” among many other plaudits. As a blogger about stage and screen who has also read every one of Morrison’s 12 novels, I can personally attest the novels are highly cinematic, well-suited to cinema. And since 2020, there has been a push for more dramatic works by African-American and minority authors. So what gives? The first answer is that since 2020 there have been in fact two announcements made tha...

“In 1956, the year Long Day’s Journey into Night premiered, the reputation of America’s foremost dramatist was at an all-time low,” wrote scholar Ralph L. Corrigan Jr. in a paper on November 7, 1956. “Most critics were content to think of the dramatist as an outdated, over-the-hill, third-rate thinker who had been lucky to write a few decent plays.” Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey changed all that. The playwright has enjoyed a seemingly invincible reputation almost ever since that period of waning popularity. But might such a moment ever be in danger of returning? When a star-studded production of O'Neill's Anna Christie with Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge opens at St. Ann's Warehouse on November 28, it will be the first time since 2020 that a major Off-Broadway production of O'Neill's has launched, and Broadway is currently in the longest drought for productions of plays by Eugene O’Neill in the more than 100 years since it started producing O’Neill. The...

In Madeline Miller’s novel Circe , the famous title witch has occasion to speak to her niece, Medea. Circe, who turns many of Odysseus’ men into pigs before he persuades her to change them back and she gets in bed with him, warns Medea that her husband Jason is waning in his feelings for her. Medea will not listen. “They will never take Jason from me,” Medea says in the novel. “I have my powers, and I will use them.” Circe, whom Miller turns from a villain to a feminist anti-hero by empathizing with her where males have not over centuries of representations, fears the worst will happen in Medea’s case. Miller can rehabilitate Circe, but she can’t quite rehabilitate Medea. The bloody conclusion of Medea’s story is well known to most people with a passing knowledge of Greek myth. She kills both of her children to get back at her ex-husband as he marries a new bride, kills that new bride and sets fire to the temple. A hard character to rehabilitate. But then, Miller didn’t have Sondra R...

President Trump’s renewed promise today to execute a 100-percent tariff on film production outside the United States is a symptom of a desperate state of affairs in the film industry. The stream of grim headlines coming out of Hollywood this year shows why.  “Production in Hollywood plunges to historic lows as nearly half of US projects move abroad ,” read one headline in August from Senal News. The story reports that Hollywood production jobs are down by 92,000 from 2022. And it’s not just a question of local production. Box office receipts are suffering too. “The 2025 box office is off to a terrible start . Is the problem supply or demand?” read the LA Times on March 25. The story says the problem is supply. There are fewer movies in theaters, fewer movies being made, and fewer people attending the movies that are in theaters. But you wouldn’t know it from the crowds at screenings of classic films at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. On August 14, I attended the third in a strin...

A new opera season is upon us, one that in April will see the celebration of the 100 th  anniversary of what has been called “the death of opera.” On April 26, 1926, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini burst into tears upon completing the first performance of Puccini’s last opera  Turandot . Since then, though many excellent new operas have been performed, it’s been argued that popular opera has died.  The New York Times  opera critic Zachary Woolfe in 2024 went so far as to say “A century on, it can be said confidently: With Puccini died the great opera tradition. There have been extraordinary works created since his death, but next to none have penetrated the public consciousness, or the core repertoire.” The century of music past “Nessun Dorma” ( Turnadot ’s greatest aria, which itself has been played almost to death) has been diverse and exciting, and there are more new operas than ever to get excited about in the last few years, with many different styles of cl...