A satirical play at Hamburg’s Ernst Deutsch Theater about Timmy, the stranded humpback whale, “reimagines the media spectacle as a passion play in which the leviathan is worshipped, crucified and eventually cut up into sacramental blubber bites.” (The Guardian, 7/16/26)
Mark Gatiss “gives a splendidly skin-crawling performance” as the title gangster in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new staging of Brecht’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. (The Guardian, 4/22/26; The New York Times, 4/22/26)
“The souffleur has all but vanished, except in Germany, where they sit in the front row—or even take to the stage.” (The Guardian, 9/26/23)
Jennifer Homans attended Tanztheater Wuppertal’s performance of “Água,” but all she could see were ghosts: “If these young dancers have something to say, they will need their own form, not Pina Bausch’s. Her Germany is not their Germany, and dance, like history, is nontransferrable.” (The New Yorker, 3/27/23)
Linie 1 gets a new staging and keeps that ’80s feeling alive. “The entire three-hour show plays out on west Berlin’s U1 underground line, which used to run from glitzy Wittenbergplatz to grotty Schlesisches Tor in the years before the Berlin Wall fell.” (The Guardian, 4/16/23)
There’s a new recording of a Paul Dessau opera that was absent from stages for far too long: “Involving more than 30 solo singing roles, a nine-part chorus and a huge orchestra, as well as dancers and actors, Lanzelot was one of the most ambitious operas ever mounted in the GDR.” (The Guardian, 1/12/23)
The cross-gender casting in a new production of The Threepenny Opera at the Vienna Volksoper isn’t just a gimmick, but a thoughtful experiment with Brechtian Verfremdung in a piece many theatergoers know all too well. (The New York Times, 12/23/22)