Joshua Furst
By Joshua Furst
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Culture ‘Seinfeld’ Revolutionized Pop Culture 25 Years Ago — and That’s a Bad Thing
Every era gets the sitcom it deserves. In the early 90s that sitcom was “Seinfeld,” a show about a motley collection of Jews on the upper west side of Manhattan, kvetching, kvelling and ordering soup. And now, 25 years after its premiere, Seinfeld can be seen as a turning point not only in American comedy,…
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Culture An Empty Bob Dylan Biography
Dylan: The Biography By Dennis McDougal Turner Publishing Company, 540 pages, $35 ‘What is this sh–?” Greil Marcus famously asked in his Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s most reviled album, “Self Portrait.” Throughout my reading of “Dylan: The Biography,” by Dennis McDougal, I’ve been asking myself the same question. It purports to be “the…
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Culture Michael Shannon Makes Eugene Ionesco’s Disorienting ‘The Killer’ Memorable
The first task would be to describe the play. In the case of the production of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Killer” currently running at Theatre for a New Audience, this is not so easy to do. We open on Berenger (Michael Shannon), the shambling existentialist everyman who frequently leads us through Ionesco’s plays, touring a neighborhood…
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Culture Still Waiting for Godot
Killing the Second Dog By Marek Hlasko, translated from the Polish by Tomasz Mirkowicz New Vessel Press, 143 pages, $15.99 In the aftermath of World War II, while Europe was responding to the dissipation of the old empires and feudal orders by reconfiguring itself around capitalist and communist ideologies, its novelists took it upon themselves…
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Culture When Diane Arbus Met a Giant in Her Field
Diane Arbus’s “Jewish Giant,” the second installment in the Jewish Museum’s innovative Masterpieces & Curiosities series, is an entire show dedicated to interrogating the competing meanings contained within a single photograph by Diane Arbus. The photo itself, “A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y, 1970,” is mounted in a vitrine…
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Culture Why Woody Allen’s ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ Is a Bright Shining Lie
The plot of “Bullets over Broadway,” the new musical by Woody Allen (with essential help from director Susan Stroman and music “adaptor” and lyrics tweaker Glen Kelly), is built around an elaborate setup. David Shayne, a Greenwich Village artiste in the vein of Eugene O’Neill, discovers to his astonishment that one of his experimental, symbol-laden…
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Culture Marlo Thomas Made Me the Man I Am Today
Forty years ago, when Marlo Thomas met with executives at ABC Television after turning in the final cut of “Free to Be… You and Me,” the one-hour special they’d commissioned based on her best-selling children’s album, they told her, in that way the business people who control our media so often do, that they loved…
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Culture A Coupla Jewish Writers Talk Theater, Drinking and Escaping the Midwest
Over the past 15 years or so, Brooke Berman has built a reputation as one of the funniest and most emotionally honest playwrights of her generation. Her often autobiographical work includes “Hunting and Gathering,” which received a celebrated production at Primary Stages in 2008, as well as “Smashing,” “Until We Find Each Other,” and “The…
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