The darkly mesmerizing ANOTHER MEDEA, starring Tom Hewitt, is back in New York City for a run at the Wild Project (photo by Aaron Mark)
Who: All for One Solo Theater
What: Another Medea
Where: The Wild Project, 195 East Third St. between Aves. A & B, 212-228-1195
When: January 14-31, $40-$60
Why: When this one-man show, written and directed by Aaron Mark and inspired by Euripides’ Medea myth, played the All for One Theater Festival in fall 2013, we were absolutely blown away by it, hoping it would soon return for a longer run; the play we called “as intense and gripping a show as you’re ever likely to see” is now scheduled for sixteen performances this month at the Wild Project, once again starring Broadway veteran Tom Hewitt (The Rocky Horror Show, Chicago, The Lion King, Jesus Christ Superstar), who we said in October 2013 “is nothing short of breathtaking, immersing himself in the role of an extremely complex and conflicted character whose crime is unfortunately all too familiar in these difficult times. His mastery of the material is stunning, poetically delivered without calling attention to itself.” You can read our full review of Another Medea, which deals with a man imprisoned for committing a horrific act, here.
They don’t come much bigger than Orson Welles in his dark potboiler Touch of Evil, as he nearly bursts through the frame as spectacularly dastardly police captain Hank Quinlan. A deliciously devious corrupt lawman, Quinlan is an enormous drunk who has no trouble breaking the rules to get his man. Charlton Heston took a lot of criticism playing Mike Vargas, a Mexican drug enforcement agent newly married to beautiful blonde Susan (Janet Leigh), who soon finds herself menaced by a dangerous gang as a weak-kneed, pre-McCloud Dennis Weaver looks the other way. The film famously opens with a remarkable crane shot that goes on for more than three minutes, setting the stage like no other establishing shot in the history of cinema. And the final scene with Marlene Dietrich as sultry hooker Tana is a lulu as well, highlighted by one of the great all-time movie lines. What goes on in between is a lurid tale of murder and revenge filled with unexpected twists and turns, featuring appearances by such Welles regulars as Joseph Cotten, Akim Tamiroff, Joseph Calleia, and Ray Collins. There was a lot of hype surrounding the film in 1998 when it was restored to match Welles’s original desires, but the final product lives up to its billing. As part of its “Orson Welles 100” festival, honoring the centennial of the always controversial auteur’s birth, Film Forum is screening three different versions of this deeply affecting noir masterpiece: the 108-minute pre-release version on January 14 (with the 7:00 show introduced by Welles historian Joseph McBride), the 93-minute original theatrical edition on January 29, and the 111-minute reconstruction on February 1-2. The Welles festival continues through February 3 with such double features as The Lady from Shanghai and The Third Man, Compulsion and The Long, Hot Summer, and Jane Eyre and Tomorrow Is Forever, multiple versions of Macbeth, and two evenings of Wellesiana rarities hosted by series consultant McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career. 
Who ever thought that little old Yiddish mensch Isaac Bashevis Singer was such a horndog? Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser begin The Muses of Bashevis Singer, their light and playful documentary, with the following quote from the Nobel Prize-winning author: “In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women. Lately I’m dreaming of a harem full of translators. If those translators could be women in addition, this would be paradise on earth.” Well, it seems that Singer, who was born in Poland in 1902, emigrated to the United States in 1935, and died in Florida in 1991 at the age of eighty-eight, found that paradise, as Galay and Betser meet with a series of women who were among many hand-picked by Singer, the man who nearly singlehandedly preserved Yiddish literature in the twentieth century, to serve as his translators, and not necessarily because of their language skills. “There were certain women who were more than just translators to him. It happened quite often,” says his Swedish publisher, Dorothea Bromberg, who also talks about Alma, Singer’s wife of more than fifty years. “He loved her, I’m sure, in his own way,” she adds. “She was very jealous of him, and she was completely right.” Galay and Betser meet with translators Eve Fridman, Evelyn Torton Beck, Dvorah Telushkin, Marie-Pierre Bay, Duba Leibell, and Dr. Bilha Rubenstein as well as Singer biographers Florence Noiville and Janet Hadda, his granddaughters Hazel Karr and Merav Chen-Zamir, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy playwright Leah Napolin, and his longtime secretary and proofreader, Doba Gerber, who share intimate, surprising tales about the author of such books as The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Shosha, and Enemies, a Love Story and such short stories as “Gimpel the Fool,” “A Friend of Kafka,” and “Zlateh the Goat.”