In our world, professional theatre—especially musical theatre—has become a luxury product enjoyed mainly by the wealthy urban elite. Why? Because putting on a great play is expensive! Think just about the salaries for all those people on stage who put out world-class performances eight times a week! Then think of the cost of even a simple set, along with costumes and props and lights and sound and backstage and front-of-house employees! Heck, even the laundry bill is shockingly high! Now, consider that the only real venues that can house a play full-time (overhead costs!) are in New York City. Even for me, here in Pennsylvania, the three-to-four-hour drive to NYC is expensive and difficult. You have to drive all that way, watch a play, somehow eat three meals, and drive back. The last part usually happens around 2:00 AM, and your body and mind are stupidly tired from all the stress and stimuli of the metropolis. Harrowing stories from the drive back? I’ve got a couple. Or did you think you could afford to stay overnight in the Times Square area? (If you can, you also aren’t crying over the $300 tickets, like the rest of us.)

So (as I always say), theatre people (less than 15% of whom are employed in their craft at any one time) cannot afford to actually see theatre in America. We have our school loans like anyone else. We also require food, water, and shelter. The terrible thing is that we require theatre—and that is something we must save money (what money?) for all year long, or longer. And without it, yes, we’re raisins in the sun. Good theatre (not community theatre or high school theatre) sustains a vital spark in us that makes a tedious life worth living. Imagine being effectively barred from any access to your vocation/passion/trade. Just entering an empty theatre space can sustain me for a couple months.

And so, we come to the current point. If we can’t enter the room where it happens and experience that exchange of energy that live theatre provides (which we usually can’t), we need some kind of remote access to our medium. And God bless (truly and earnestly) programs like the UK’s National Theatre Live, which provides live recordings of a few plays each year to a select number of cinemas. (Those cinemas are still at least an hour from me, but that’s more doable. And the ticket price is within possibility.) A few other avenues for this type of thing exist: occasionally on PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center or Great Performances, in very rare livestreams of Broadway shows, and in the blessed medium of proshots.

I believe that the word has only recently been codified, but proshots have been around (sporadically) for decades. There are professional recordings of several Sondheim shows (Company x2, Passion, Follies, Into the Woods, and Sunday in the Park with George) and a couple Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals (Cats, sadly, included). There ends the list until recent years. In the last half-decade, proshots (professionally filmed performances of plays, with multiple cameras and steadicams onstage, etc.) have become more common. We have Sutton Foster’s iconic performance in Anything Goes. We have Hamilton with the original cast. We have Waitress, starring its composer, Sara Bareilles. We have David Byrne’s American Utopia (hallelujah!). Why so few? Because (on top of the massive costs of staging a show) proshots are very expensive to do well. And only 10-20% of Broadway shows recoup their investment, period. Adding a proshot is sort of like taking out a second mortgage. You take on more debt you may never be able to pay off.

Finally, some good news: proshots are becoming more common because people are actually going to the cinema to watch them and buying them on digital and physical media. In the past twelve months, we have feasted on the rapturously reviewed remount of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, Hadestown: The Musical is in cinemas now, and next month will see the arrival of Six. The bounty! (Is he finally going to talk about Hadestown? Yes!)

The best new musical of the past ten years (in fact, this year marks its tenth year on Broadway!), Anaïs Mitchell’s retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth is probably the most beautiful musical I know. You all know how devoted I am to Sondheim, but Hadestown has a totally unique approach to its music, story, form, and performance that blend seamlessly into one 2.5-hour opus of masterful complexity and raw beauty. I usually list “Why Do We Build the Wall?” as my favorite song from the show, but that’s mainly because it is the only really contained individual song. The rest of the musical is broken into numbers, but it is more of a river of motifs that bubble over each other.

Set in a non-time and place that resembles 1930s New Orleans, the play is a literal retelling. Led by Hermes (our master of ceremonies), the cast interacts with the audience, acknowledging their presence and vital role in the proceedings. It is like a huge-scale campfire story. The characters are performing for us, “singing the song” in the same way the oral tradition kept these myths (including a certain other current blockbuster) alive. In keeping with that tradition, almost all of the dialogue rhymes and follows a rhythm, imperceptibly moving in and out of song mid-sentence. The music, influenced by New Orleans, is completely its own thing, as are the styles of the movement and staging. A simple set, which morphs from a railway bar to the factory town of Hades, is mostly an open space with three concentric turntables, the center of which raises and lowers. The simplicity of this design and its thematic weight is typical of the entire production: a story that is told and retold endlessly, about the cycles of seasons and oppression and journeys, can only be told with a revolving stage (and the central elevator piece literalizes Hell for us as it descends).

In the same way, the show’s plot and themes are made of wheels within wheels. The true genius of the piece is how far out those circles go—and how they all comment on and support one another. As with any telling of Orpheus and Eurydice, it is a tale of art, love, and death. Hadestown adds layers about marriage, politics, class, cyclical reasoning, nature, inspiration, resilience, and rebellion. The central pairs of lovers—Orpheus and Eurydice, Hades and Persephone—play out these themes from the bookend perspectives of youth and age (idealism and jaded experience). Love and power, as well as subservience and doubt, are matters of forgetting, or taking for granted. That simple everyday tragedy is at the core of Tragedy itself. If you start to undervalue or presume in your marriage, your leadership, your ambition, your art, your love, your oppression, or even the course of a millennia-old story…the entire world goes out of tune in that widening gyre.

The Hadestown proshot, filmed in London, brings back the original Broadway principals (Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, André De Shields, Patrick Page, and Amber Gray) alongside the current West End Chorus and Fates. (These Fates are the weak spot of the proshot. Their voices don’t meld in the same liquid way that the originals’ did, and many notes that are foregrounded on the cast album are buried here.) This is vital, because each of these actors is so intrinsically bound to their character. Who can replace De Shields as Hermes, Carney as Orpheus, or the singular Gray as Persephone? Patrick Page—the only man who should ever be allowed to play Hades—suffered a bad leg injury the week before filming, and when I heard about it, I began to panic. However, in a lovely bit of serendipity, Page’s isolation boot causes him to move like a satyr. Its angle and restriction of movement actually enhance Hades’s characterization, making him look like a half-goat, a man in the middle of losing his humanity to a demonic influence. What could be more perfect?

When I saw Hadestown on Broadway (Yes, I won tickets!), I immediately realized that it is, more than any other musical, reliant on the live element of theatre. The way the actors pull in the audience by speaking to them, at the same time acknowledging the band members by name, creates a ritual space for this age-old myth to be reembodied. This is the only thing the proshot cannot replicate. I see no way around that, however…while I would have replaced these Fates in a heartbeat.

The bottom line is that you cannot see this cast perform this musical live in 2026. You likely can’t even afford to go see the current company on Broadway (but if you can, do). But, now, you and me and everyone we know can enjoy this beautiful production as many times as we wish! We can tell it again and again and again.

Just as Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr made movies about and from duration, Icelandic visionary Hlynur Pálmason works with span. It took me almost a week to write this review because that first sentence immediately entered my brain, but I could not find a suitable word for the aspect of time Pálmason works with. Finally, I have chosen “span,” but it is still an ill-fitting enough word that I must try to define what I mean by it.

Both directors (RIP Tarr) sculpt with time, specifically the passing of time. The difference between their media, though, is that of being inside that time as it passes versus outside of it. Tarr bewitched with long, almost static shots accompanied by a repetitive score. He spoke with this duration (his greatest film is seven and a half hours long) about the drudgery and stagnation of the Eastern Bloc after the fall of communism. The viewer is enclosed in the pace and aesthetic of that creeping time. Pálmason works from the outside, making films about the passing of time as viewed from a more-or-less omniscient place of observation. His films also build using stillness across time, but they do so through processes such as time-lapse photography. This is a particular favorite of his, and he is happy to condense three years of filming into ten minutes for us by the use of a still camera recording short bursts of action over that entire time.

He uses other, perhaps more subtle, ways of showing long-term temporal progression. In The Love That Remains—a deceptively mundane chronicle of a family dealing with a recently dissolved marriage—another striking device is the work of the artist mother (which is actually art long practiced by the director himself). Over the course of the movie, we watch her slow process from beginning to end, intuiting the final product in the process. She cuts metal sheets into large shapes, arranges those metal shapes on top of outdoor canvases, and waits while the elements rust the patterns into the cloth. (Even then, there is a lengthy process of cleaning, drying, and setting that makes the entire process about a year in length and creates some visually interesting and beautiful pieces.)

Yet another image of what I’m calling span is the pet project of the family’s three adolescent children (who are also Pálmason’s own children, just as the house and lands where the film is shot are his). It begins with the digging of a deep hole. A tree trunk is placed upright in the hole, and the earth is gradually packed around it to create a beautifully ancient-looking monument pole. Next, they begin to cut and shape styrofoam, attaching it to the pole over time into what we begin to recognize as a human form. The form is given clothing and antique armor before becoming a target for the children’s arrows. This slow building from a sort of grave to a sort of memorial to an image of saintlike martyrdom suggests many themes, ranging from the Icelandic family’s Viking heritage to the human drive towards violent entropy and the slow death and salvation of the family following the parents’ divorce.

Shall I go on? The father, Magnus, is a commercial fisherman who spends long tours on an industrial boat in the middle of the ocean. As with the activities of the other family members, Magnus’s time is spent in a long, stark, and unforgiving process of laying nets, gathering them, sorting fish, cleaning fish, and filleting fish. When he is not on the freezing deck, he is uneasily berthed with about half a dozen other men who walk through their onboard domestic life like particularly randy zombies. (And wait until you see the ultimate image of time passing when Magnus is called to return home…!)

Amid all of this, everyday life trudges on. The parents are often on autopilot and cannot work out a way to draw new boundaries post-divorce that may keep the family unit intact. The children are flurries of energy, aggression (simultaneously playful and in earnest), discussions about adult life, and endless archery practice. The family takes hikes across the local hills and mountains. They harvest berries. They squabble. And surrounding all of this seemingly banal activity, Iceland shows a thousand gorgeous faces, like a protean landscape of wrath and grace.

The last piece of this lovely film is the penetration of images on a vast continuum of surrealism. Sometimes, small incidents occur in the distance (did the mother just successfully wish that plane to crash alone and unwitnessed?). Sometimes, we are treated to quick montages of striking images—the twins holding the two halves of a large fish, the same cradling nothing gently in their cupped hands—and eventually the movie breaks out into full-bodied…dreams? (I could never spoil the exquisite surprise of these moments for you.)

Hlynur Pálmason’s fourth feature (after the likewise beautiful Winter Brothers, A White White Day, and Godland), The Love That Remains is not interested in grand plot or moral lessons. Instead, it is a mood board of memories, textures, and dreams that weaves a complex but perhaps ineffable portrait of one family as time passes over and through them, invoking the symbology of Jonah, Joan of Arc (“You mean Noah’s Ark.”), Galilean fishing trips, and more, all in the span of their potentiality.

This is going to be a review full of disclaimers. I’ll get them out of the way up front, but they probably all could be placed under this one piece of advice: do not get caught up in the petty culture war discourse regarding this movie. It’s a bunch of ideological nonsense that has very little to do with this film or the epic poem it’s based on. For one thing, Elliot Page does not play Achilles. Achilles is not in this movie at all. Yes, Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen (and Clytemnestra), but it’s a very small role that amounts to being a trophy wife for much more important white men. Nothing about that is (oh, how tiring the phrase has become!) “woke”. This film is very orthodox, very conservative, and actually very heavily coded as a Christian parable. Yeah, how surprising is that? But I’ll get to that in a little bit.

More disclaimers. I’ve heard so much talk about “historical inaccuracy.” 1. This is not a historical tale but a fiction. 2. It is not even a historical fiction by genre: it is a myth. In literature, we use that term to categorize culture-spanning stories built on tropes found in all cultures. (Yes, the Bible is myth. The word doesn’t connote lack of verity in this context.) 3. The ancient world was much more heterogeneous than we have been taught by Hollywood. The world was at once very small and very diverse. Life in the Mediterranean involved cultures from Africa, the Middle East, Spain, Italy, and (yes) Greece, and those cultures were influenced by the “barbarian” societies of England and Scandinavia. They all intermingled. In a way, the Greco-Roman eras were times of globalization, but with the belief that the globe was much smaller than we now know. So, yes, Romanesque armor and Viking-style ships and “Nubian beauties” are not out of place in ancient Greece. 4. The Odyssey is not a novel. It is an epic poem from a long oral tradition. Therefore, there is no original or definitive text. This is another facet of myth. The story was passed down by traveling storytellers, and the poetry they recited was referred to as “songs.” Those songs changed from teller to teller and age to age. By the time anyone was able to write them down, there were many versions. When you add that all English versions are translations, the claim of a “correct” text is silly. Throughout time, each translation has reflected the mores of its time more than those of ancient Greece. I remind you again that this sort of fluctuating and living form is the essence of myth. (The Bible has the benefit of being divinely inspired and upheld, but you’d likely be surprised by the process used to select the 66 books we now refer to as Scripture.)

And so, what we ask when approaching an adaptation of something like The Odyssey is how the old story is retold and what that says about the artist’s thoughts about their own cultural moment. Through that lens, we can now begin to discuss Christopher Nolan’s new film mega-event that recently opened in cinemas.

This film does a great job of handling the most famous parts of the story. It doesn’t feel as if it were three hours long (although it is), and the filmmakers have managed to include all the classic episodes, giving each room and attention and never making any part feel rushed or squeezed in. It also excels at presenting those episodes with a simultaneous coherence and variety, finding new but natural ways to visualize each piece. Hades (Iceland) is especially effective (both creepy and almost holy), and Circe’s episode is creatively staged and disturbing. The cyclops is not a symmetrical being but a twisted and malformed distortion of the human form (the Imago Dei). The fall of Troy is appropriately huge in scale while still remaining a local, city-sized event. The suitors in Ithaca are portrayed as what we currently call “bros,” full of f-bombs and disrespectful slang. And it is all masterfully interwoven in Odysseus’s returning memories on Calypso’s island.

Calypso, it should be said, is presented as a much more sympathetic character than usual. This actually works well to distinguish her plot and Circe’s, which have always felt repetitive to me. The Trojan Horse is the most elegantly designed iteration I’ve seen, which may seem far-fetched, given what the men had to work with.—but it is another mainstay of myth that objects and events are more signifiers than naturalistic plot devices. (It could help immensely to think of this film as a parable.) The narrative bounces back and forth between Odysseus’s trials and Penelope’s siege by the degenerate suitors in Ithaca, including Telemachus’s coming-of-age story (which made the boyish Tom Holland a great casting choice who was callow but could command authority by the story’s end). All the character arcs are well-defined and rather beautifully portrayed. The acting is good, with everyone acquitting themselves well, especially Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Tom Holland as the central family unit.

Nolan managed to have a viewpoint (which we’ll discuss in a second) and yet allow the events of the tale to retain their mythic breadth of meaning, interplay, and resonance. Odysseus is, fittingly, no hero here. He begins his journey while being hailed as a war hero, but his acts and motivations are prideful, irresponsible, and ultimately despicable. He only becomes the hero people believe him to be at the end of his long journey, returning to Ithaca a very different (and more worthy) man. This change is wrought slowly and poignantly, and his monologue before the final climax—in which he confesses the sins of his past self and his gradual alteration at the hands of the gods— is the heart of the film.

So let’s talk about the gods. They are treated much more in keeping with Christian belief than polytheist demagogues. Odysseus’s reaction to the idea of the gods could be said to be the core of his real journey. In the beginning, he mocks his crew’s superstitious worries about offending the gods and attributes his ensuing chastening to normal bad luck which they insist on imbuing with divine significance. He calls them “your gods,” and even when he is haunted by visions of Athena (the only Olympian we ever see in the film), he doesn’t know any more than we do if she is in his imagination or a true outside being. The short explanation of his transformation is that he learns to stop denying and fighting against divine forces and to instead surrender to their unknown and mysterious will. (Usually Nolan is more on top of his promotional campaign. All the posters read, “Defy the gods,” which is the exact opposite of the film’s main theme.)

This language should sound familiar, because Nolan seeds his screenplay with close paraphrases of Biblical texts. Much is made of “Zeus’s Law,” which amounts to loving your neighbor as yourself and taking care of widows, orphans, and aliens because you may be entertaining angels unawares. When Odysseus questions Athena, asking, “Why don’t you speak in ways we can understand?” her response is basically that the heavens declare the glory of God and that no man has an excuse to claim ignorance. In another conversation, she chastises his refusal to listen to what he knows the gods are telling him with a statement that might easily be paraphrased, “I sent you Athena and Circe. If you will not listen to them, you will not believe, even if blind Tiresius returns from Hades to warn you.” Such near-quotations of Scripture are surprisingly common and well-deployed.

The film’s weakest element is (unfortunately) its opening. After a bafflingly pointless title card (“In a time of apparent magic…”), we see rapper Travis Scott as a bard “singing the song” of Odysseus’s victory at Troy. Scott (real name: Jacques Bermon Webster II) cannot act, and it’s a bad first impression. However, by the end, when Scott helps perform a gorgeous song over the credits, I realized that Nolan is quite rightly linking the oral tradition with its closest modern equivalent: rap. After this dubious beginning, which foregrounds the suitors’ very non-Homerian contemporary speech patterns, the movie slowly finds its footing, and once it does, it catches the wind and never stops.

Trust me, I tried to hate this movie, but it just couldn’t be done.

The concept certainly isn’t original, nor is the structure new. We’ve famously tread this ground before with, for example, Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A cult favorite of mine (my own cult, membership: one), 2015’s The Overnight (so overlooked), seems almost as if it has to be based on the same Spanish play, alth…

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I watched this TV movie of the hilarious Mary Rodgers/Marshall Barer musical adaptation of “The Princess and the Pea” when it was first aired. I watched it for the second time today, and it is so much better than I remembered! Of course, now I know the show (and the cast). The cast was great. Here is my problem. Lol!

This show has a couple songs that are…

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This Powell and Pressburger film has much in common with their ecstatic A Canterbury Tale. Like the Glue Man, the so-called A plot (about a baffling new German explosive device that is killing civilians) takes more than a backseat for most of the movie. Instead, it is a sort of pretense or crucible through which the characters are revealed and tested an…

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Happy Canada Day, everyone! To mark the occasion, I share some great Canadian art for you to become familiar with!

Novelists

Margaret Laurence (The Fire-Dwellers, A Jest of God, The Diviners)

Thomas King (Green Grass, Running Water; Truth and Bright Water)

Joy Kogawa (Obasan, Itsuka)

Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

Margaret Atwood (The MaddAddam Trilogy, The Handmai…

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As someone who has lived with mental illness both first- and secondhand, I am always interested in films that tackle the subject. At least half of that interest is fear: people can do so much harm through misunderstanding or mishandling. Thus, it has taken me fifteen years to get around to watching the Jodie Foster-directed film, The Beaver.

The trailers…

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Masaki Kobayashi’s three-part epic, The Human Condition, doesn’t seem to show up on many Best Films of All Time lists, and yet all three installments (technically, there are six chapters, presented two at a time, but I don’t want this to get too confusing) are perpetually in Letterboxd’s Top 25 Narrative Films (based on user ratings). It is spoken of wi…

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Director Gore Verbinski made his name with films like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring, but he has been heading in a different direction lately, starting with his 2016 film, A Cure for Wellness—a direction he now takes to absurd extremes in his latest: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

Good Luck… is another entry in the hot genre of Gonzo Cinema, whic…

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I am very wary of any movie on its fifth installment. In my day <wry smile to make it seem ironic when it’s just true that I’m middle-aged>, we had trilogies At The Most. Now, every animated film has to outdo Rocky in the numbers department. That wry smile loses some of its irony when I reflect that this franchise has already seen three main actors die …

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Paddy Chayefsky. The greatest screenwriter in history? Maybe. His name is enough to make me watch a movie. (And here, Frederic March’s name seals the deal. No other actor could do this so well!)

In the hands of any other writer, these characters would have clear feelings that they and we understood perfectly. Like every film. You would be able to boil a …

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Welcome to the Steven Spielberg Cinematic Universe. You’ve been here all along.

It has been a long time since I had a cinematic experience like Disclosure Day. First of all, the movies I want to see are never in the rooms with the really big screens, but this one was. How I wish that I could watch every film on such a scale! It was incredible. But, all t…

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Perhaps Charles Dickens’s least-read novel, Barnaby Rudge is currently my favorite. Rudge was the first time Dickens had put in the time before he started publishing to cement his story, its themes, and its characters. His book prior to this one—The Old Curiosity Shop—especially showed the signs of the author making it up as he wrote. (His novels were r…

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I am a big fan of the original cartoons featuring He-Man and She-Ra, so I knew from the trailers that this was not going to be my cup of tea. Nicholas Galitzine was better than I thought, and the big surprise was that Jared Leto’s Skeletor is pretty much perfect. On the whole, though, this movie is more confused about its identity than Prince Adam.

There…

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There’s no director out there with as strict a formula as John Carney. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, I am sure the titles of his Irish pop-centric films will: Once, Begin Again, Sing Street, and Flora and Son. Power Ballad is his new music dramedy. It stars Paul Rudd as a struggling musician and Nick Jonas’s chest hair with a special appearance by Ni…

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I am not a fan of documentaries. I dislike their tone of omniscience. I hate their pretended objectivity—but I hate those with obvious agendas more. I don’t like the social contract that we will pay no attention to the man behind the curtain/camera. They almost all ignore the fact that observing a thing alters it—especially if you put a camera in someon…

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1. The Seven Year Itch (1955)

2. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

3. There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954)

4. All About Eve (1950)

5. The Misfits (1961)

6. Clash by Night (1952)

7. Niagara (1953)

8. How To Marry a Millionaire (1953)

9. Ladies of the Chorus (1948)

10. Bus Stop (1956)

11. The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

12. Let’s Make Love (1960)

13. The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)

14. Home Town Story (1951)

15. Lo…

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I recently watched Lady Gaga’s incredible 2025 Coachella performance, titled The Art of Personal Chaos. I am only casually interested in Gaga, mostly because of her acting and the theatricality of her persona. When she first stepped into the spotlight (I saw her first appearance on TV!), she was a very different entertainer than she is today. Her songs …

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