Tom Isler
Tom Isler
Recent Stories
'We Won't Pay' is well worth cost
Theater Review
One of the first -- and last -- jokes that really lands in Dario Fo's "We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!" isn't a witticism -- it's Antonia (Mimi Leiber), an impecunious, frizzy-haired housewife who has taken to eating pet food because it's cheaper than...
Festival highlights outstanding work
Patrick Huguenin '06 thought he was joking when he told Theater Studies professor Toni Dorfman that he wanted to run his unfinished script by Edward Albee for some feedback. But Dorfman didn't see any humor in Huguenin's comment and e-mailed the...
Go 'West' young man, go west
Theater Review
"The Lonesome West," written in 1997 by Martin McDonagh, is a tremendous play for many reasons, not the least of which is that it realizes the full dramatic potential of the Irish potato chip. In the smallest of objects, McDonagh finds a world of...
Ballet Hispanico takes on the Elm City with a fusion of different dance styles
Theater Preview
The swirling skirts and exposed garters so sensuously torment the dark suits and black fedoras in Ballet Hispanico's "Nightclub" that Paris Hilton looks a prude by comparison. At the Shubert tonight for one performance only, "Nightclub," conceived by...
'Floyd' showcases Yale talent despite highly cliched script
Theater Review
For two songs, "Floyd Collins" is a perfect musical -- full of life, somber portent, dramatic irony, inventive music and Christopher Grobe '05. Grobe, who is completely at home in his character's skin, plays Floyd Collins, the stubble-faced...
Mia Farrow surprises in 'Fran's Bed'
Theater Review
To write a play that is artistically superior to your typical soap opera may not be the noblest of cultural endeavors. But, at a time when Hollywood values screenwriters less than digital effects and much of primetime television comes without writing...
Dramat's 'Slaughter' bleeds
Shenandoah Shakespeare to perform at Yale
Toward the end of "Slaughter City," a sliced and diced cloud of muddled theater by Naomi Wallace, one of the play's only comprehensible moments bubbles to the surface. A ghost of sausages past, with a meat grinder slung around his neck, appears before...
'Much Ado' shoots the moon
Theater
There's a startling and inspired insight in Shira Milikowsky's '04 otherwise satisfyingly conservative Dramat production of William Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." And it comes from outer space. Early on in the play, the cast of...
Able acting fills funny 'Arcadia'
Nothing in "Arcadia" sets the heart aflutter like iterated algorithms, the second law of thermodynamics, the history of English gardens and the discovery of esoteric historical documents. And only a zealous romantic like Tom Stoppard could write a...
Long Wharf Theatre- commissioned
"Who are Americans to lecture us about fear?" asks a victim of terrorism, quoted in a New York Times article, reacting to a school bus bombing in an unnamed foreign country. The Times circulates in a row of seats in a Metro-North car as the train...