ROMEO JULIET DIRECTED BY SAM GOLD. CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE.
WHEN SAM GOLD's new production of Romeo and Juliet, starring PYTs Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, was announced in April, the PR team came in hot. "THE YOUTH ARE F**KED," shouted all the marketing materials in a color scheme that Charli XCX might sign off on. The Gen-Z coding was blatant, and at the same time, the production styled its title Romeo + Juliet, apparently trying to rope in people who wept into their popcorn at the Baz Luhrmann movie while many Brat Summer revelers were pre-utero. Bleachers' Jack Antonoff would be writing music; in a promotional music video, Connor and Zegler tried on silly sunglasses and played with stuffed animals; the whole cast was hot and young and looked like they could tell you about your star chart. Where was Shakespeare in all this? Did it matter?
Marketing is marketing, and it might not have mattered then, but it certainly does now that you can see all this highkey, try-hard set dressing clogging up Circle in the Square. At the center of the whole trendy, clubby jumble is, as Cordelia once said to her dad, nothing.
One could be forgiven for walking away from this show's two (and a half) hours' traffic thinking that maybe Romeo and Juliet is kind of mid after all. Such is the enervating effect of so clickbait-y and uncurious a production.
Denne historien er fra November 04-17, 2024-utgaven av New York magazine.
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Denne historien er fra November 04-17, 2024-utgaven av New York magazine.
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THE BEST ART SHOWS OF THE YEAR
IN NOVEMBER, Sotheby's made history when it sold for a million bucks a painting made by artificial intelligence. Ai-Da, \"the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork auctioned by a major auction house,\" created a portrait of Alan Turing that resembles nothing more than a bad Francis Bacon rip-off. Still, the auction house described the sale as \"a new frontier in the global art market.\"
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THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
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IT'S BEEN a year of successful straight plays, even measured by a metric at which they usually do poorly: ticket sales. Partially that's owed to Hollywood stars: Jeremy Strong, Jim Parsons, Rachel Zegler, Rachel McAdams (to my mind, the most compelling).
THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR
2024 WAS one big stress test that presented artists with a choice: Face uncomfortable realities or serve distractions to the audience. Pop music turned inward while hip-hop weathered court cases and incalculable losses. Country struggled to reconcile conservative interests with a much wider base of artists. But the year's best music offered a reprieve.
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IT WAS SURPRISING how much 2024 felt like an uneventful wake for the Peak TV era. There was still great television, but there was much more mid or meh television and far fewer moments when a critical mass of viewers seemed equally excited about the same series.
THE BEST COMEDY SPECIALS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - COMEDY SPECIALS
THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR
PEOPLE LOVED Megalopolis, hated it, puzzled over it, clipped it into memes, and tried to astroturf it into a camp classic, but, most important, they cared about it even though it featured none of the qualities you'd expect of a breakthrough work in these noisy times.
A Truly Great Time
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The Art of the Well-Stuffed Stocking
THE CHRISTMAS ENTHUSIASTS on the Strategist team gathered to discuss the oversize socks they drape on their couches and what they put inside them.
