by Jack Gohn | Jul 1, 2019 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
Berowne gloomily foresees: “Necessity will make us all forsworn Three thousand times within this three year’s space.” And by “necessity” we can be sure he means not simply the logistical necessity of dealing with women but what we might call Jurassic Park Necessity: Life finds a way. As Shakespeare himself wrote in a similar context: “The world must be peopled.” And for peopling, you need relations between the sexes.
by Jack Gohn | Jun 18, 2019 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
A thinly-disguised parable of the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui may have been written in 1941, but it may as well have been addressed directly to Americans of 2019.
by Jack Gohn | Jun 15, 2019 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
Disaster! lovingly pokes fun at two staples of 1970s popular culture: disaster movies like Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure and the disco-heavy pop music of the era. Whether to go is not going to present any great dilemmas. This is a perfect summer evening’s smart-alecky entertainment.
by Jack Gohn | Jun 3, 2019 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
The strange thing about this lyrical cornucopia: it doesn’t stick in the mind much as one departs. There is a deliberate effort to craft just such a song, ‘I Feel So Much Spring,’ as the closer, and it feels and sounds good, but by the time the song finishes, there have been so many harmonic variations sung by the various characters that the core melody has largely been overwritten mentally. What will not be overwritten is the joyous feeling that the song, and the ending, bring about.
by Jack Gohn | Mar 29, 2019 | The Close Up, Theater Reviews and Commentary
Indecent is about the power of theater to dazzle and uplift. Playwright Vogel has discussed plays that make the hair stand up on her neck. That is exactly what Indecent does: makes the hairs stand up on the back of the neck, and we may be at a loss to explain.
I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature.