Jesse Oxfeld
By Jesse Oxfeld
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Culture Copy Boy, Get Rewrite For Broadway’s New ‘Front Page!’
An upwardly mobile reporter is about to marry a nice girl and move into advertising, to make more money. A tough-talking cop rants about nonexistent subversives, to boost his own profile. The mayor is more interested in mollifying key constituencies than in fighting for justice. And the powerless cleaning lady keeps getting manhandled. “The Front…
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Culture Why Lorraine Hansberry Called Her Play ‘Up Yours, Edward Albee’
Lorraine Hansberry, who died of pancreatic cancer at age 34, had two plays produced on Broadway in her lifetime. One was “A Raisin in the Sun,” her classic answer to the Langston Hughes question about a dream deferred. The New York Drama Critics Circle named “Raisin” the best American play of the 1958–59 season, and…
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Culture The Way Barbra Streisand Was — and How She Got That Way
Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power By Neal Gabler Yale University Press, 296 pages, $25 Barbra Streisand was born poor in Brooklyn. Her father died when she was a toddler; her mother was terrible to her, and her stepfather was worse. She was gawky, unpopular and unattractive. But she was determined, and she had…
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Culture Brilliant ‘Crucible’ Returns to Broadway With Gripping Message for Age of Trump
“The indigenous American berserk,” Philip Roth called it. He was writing about the violent, calamitous antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s, when the center would not hold, when prosperous, placid Swede Levov, the Newark businessman at the center of Roth’s “American Pastoral,” saw his idyllic life upended by a beloved daughter who went the way…
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Culture Can This Be Too Much Bock and Harnick for Our Own Good?
This has been our year of living Bock-Harnickly. In October, the York Theatre Company presented “Rothschild & Sons,” a revised take on composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s 1970 “The Rothschilds,” a dull tale about the founding of the banking dynasty. In December came Bartlett Sher’s triumphant revival of their masterwork, “Fiddler on the…
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Film & TV ‘Familiar’ Characters Are African-American but the Sensibility Is Kinda Jewish
There is no curtain when you enter the theater for Danai Gurira’s “Familiar” at Playwrights Horizons. And so you get a good look, as you wait for the play to start, at its fully illuminated set, an idealized, cathedral-ceilinged suburban living space with smooth cream walls, dark-wood detailing and a towering bookcase. You know the…
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Art No Jews Please, We’re British
It was, as it should be, dark and damp when I arrived one night in the tiny village of Great Tew, at the northeastern edge of the Cotswolds. A British investment banker I know in New York had recommended eating at the Falkland Arms, a quintessential English pub, he said. And sure enough, there were…
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Culture Linda Lavin Is the ‘Mother’ of All Jewish Mothers
Let us stipulate, to begin, that Linda Lavin is excellent at playing a Jewish mother of a certain age. In fact, she is better than excellent; she is extraordinary, perfect, brilliant, perhaps the ideal, especially when that Jewish mother is wry, self-assured, precise, prickly — and when isn’t a Jewish mother (or at least a…
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