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Goethe's Faust, Parts I & II FAUST is "a circus of operatic scale, a fun house, a tango of poetry and theatrical and sonic wizardry whose virtuosity renders the work in all its surging strangeness, power and extravagant beauty. Seeing both [parts] is an unforgettable experience, the production of a great masterwork whose fidelity and excellence are unlikely to be repeated anytime soon." - The New York Times "The high point of this theatrical Matterhorn is Greenspan's rendering of Mephistopheles' last, dazzling tirade. Even I, an untiring admirer of Greenspan's work, didn't know he could get this good. After months of junk and mediocrity, I'd forgotten theater could get this good...All I'll say is: Don't be a fool. See FAUST." - Michael Feingold, Village Voice "Director David Herskovits and his crackerjack translator Douglas Langworthy have been developing this mammoth undertaking bit by careful bit - and the more they've worked, the more deliciously layered their production has become." - TimeOut New York "It is rewarding and rare when a rock musical gets the "rock" part right... People Are Wrong! is real rock...it is also great fun... The cast is, without exception, excellent and completely committed to the story." - nytheatre.com "People
Are Wrong! is a rockin' place to visit... The buoyant
and varied score, by Julia Greenberg and Robin Goldwasser
tells its tale in a catchy array of genres, from alt-country
to 1980s stadium anthem, and the lively singer-actors have a
blast tapping into their inner rock stars."
The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc "David Herskovits' Target Margin Theater... has revived a mock-medieval French play from 1910, and there's not a surplus gadget to be seen - only a peaceful, low-key environment, a single raked platform, and whatever magic the three actresses' voices can coax from the text... Herskovits' simple act of aesthetic faith has powerful resonances in a theater, and a world, hooked on every kind of overindulgence." - the Village Voice "The holy stillness of this Target Margin Theater production, masterfully evoked by director David Herskovits and his excellent ensemble, encourages the unhurried contemplation of this mysterious little play... Translated by Julian Green, the writing accumulates in gradually shifting repetitions that take on incantatory power." - Newsday
"Director David Herskovits and his Target Margin colleagues
have made a devilishly ambitious pact. In three installments
over coming seasons, they play to retranslate, adapt, and
stage Faust, Goethe's 19th-centrury master-drama, and
ultimately to assemble the evenings into one enormous
whole... Will Badgett does fine work locating and inhabiting
(Faust)'s exploding psyche... David Greenspan, whose sly way
onstage makes him a delectable choice for Mephisto, savors
Goethe's dense, poetic concoctions." "The cast does exceptionally well by the material... the devilish Target Margin has made a bargain with us, and, yes, we will dutifully return in years to come to see its story play out." - CurtainUp “…some of the most powerful singing voices you’ll ever hear…Cabaniss’ score exudes…a contemporary, atonal beauty with just a pinch of lush, Broadway worthy melody.” - The New York Times “…a cheerfully self-deconstructive opera…a grand time.” - Opera News “I can’t think of a time I enjoyed a contemporary opera or its staging more…” – Gay City News “The intelligent energy brought to it – by David Herskovits, the director, as well as the 10 cast members and several members of the deck crew who turn the circus-inspired elements of David Zinn’s set into palaces, caves, hovels and storm-pounded shores – make this production a kind of glittering cartoon. But the story of love lost that has made this part of Virgil’s epic so popular for 2,000 years is not lost in the surrounding environment…" - New York Times "Througout nine previous seasons this company has displayed a love of improbable combinations in theater. This production, opening its 10th year, is an achievement.” – New York Times “Nicole Halmos as Dido… projects power in every word and gesture” - New York Times “The Target Margin Theater expands its growing reputation as an imaginative and edgy source of Off-Broadway entertainment with its new staging of Dido…through a combination of elements—Kaye Voyce’s hip and surprising costume design, David Zinn’s glitter-encrusted sets, and Christopher Marlowe’s rich and lofty language—the production spans time to entertain millennium audiences in this story of love turned tragedy” – Columbia Spectator “Although it may appear that I am lapsing into hyperbole, I will nonetheless assert that this production could well be the critical model for contemporary experimental theater that sets out to perform pieces written before 1800. Charming, elegant, wholly satisfying, unpretentious and artistically victorious, it cannot be stressed enough how worthwhile this piece of work is.” – Show Business “Quite
amazingly, this melodramatic story, simplified and condensed
into a 90-minute version, elicits not giggles…but
intellectual and emotional involvement from its audience.” “David Herskovits patrols the border between truth and artifice. His well-known presentational style insists we acknowledge theatrical conventions before losing ourselves in the world they create. In his new production, this policy leads to an experiment in realism that manages to be simultaneously ironic and sincere.” – the Village Voice “The show is held together by a marvelously matter-of-fact performance by Mary Neufeld, as an awkward but strong-minded history professor who agrees to put up a roving guru as a favor to a friend.” – New YorkerThe Five Hysterical Girls Theorem “What (Rinne Groff’s) play demonstrates…is breathtaking ambition and kaleidoscopic style. Even at its messiest, there’s something invigorating about it all – not easy given that the subject matter ranges gleefully from abstract algebra to number theory.” – the Village Voice “Director David Herskovits’ exuberant imagination gives the play added emotional life, devising a bright, delightfully odd production full of geometric movement, exaggerated facial gesture, and even such absurdity as a nude man running across the stage” - Backstage “In David Herskovits’ hands, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the “problem play” detailing the tale of a duke who falls for a young nun, becomes a timely drama that touches on the sin of fornication, justice, and “good rule”. – Paper “What Mr. Herskovits
and his creative team have wrought is certainly an
accessible and highly theatrical evening.” “The words mesh well with the energy, wit, and honest emotion induced by the director, David Herskovits, who gets stronger in his every outing.” – New Yorker “The nontraditional casting, which privileges Downtown ingenuity over seasoned training, heightens the production’s playful theatricality.” - the Village Voice “Theatrical visionary David Herskovits and the Target Margin Theater Company present Chekhov’s The Seagull in a production that lulls us with its gracious, constant movement….Herskovits paints stunning pictures that run from one scene into another; all the senses are engaged.”– In Theater “Mr.
Herskovits can have a feather-light touch with actors in
intimate scenes that leads to lovely payoffs.” “…the dark wood sets by Lenore Doxsee and flapper-era costumes by David Zinn expertly anchor the play in a specific time and place”- New York Times “The star of the production is set-and-lighting designer Lenore Doxsee, who has created magically both a detailed wood-paneled bar and a New York apartment complete with windows and air-shaft. Wayne Frost’s quirky sound design of bells, tweets, and whistles adds a great deal to the whimsy of the fairy tale.” – Town & Village
“There’s
an offbeat 1929 comedy playing at the Vineyard Theatre that
has some of the best comic direction in town.”
“’South’, a 40-year old play by American expatriate Julian Green (now 96 years old and still residing in Paris), was the subject of much controversy when it debuted in London in 1955 starring Denholm Elliott. In response to Lord Chamberlain’s refusal to grant a license for a public performance of the play, the director, Peter Hall, remarked that the play was “not primarily about homosexuality: this topic is only a thread in Green’s tapestry.”” – Bergen News “It’s the story of a secretly gay young Polish American nobleman wearing the (soon-to-be) Union Army uniform in the South.” – Daily News “To Mr. Green’s
delicate play of portentous encounters and softly expressed
desires, the director David Herskovits and his young Target
Margin troupe have brought their deconstructionist,
iconoclastic theater style.” – New York Times “The narrative covers more than a decade during the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th-century Europe. It focuses on the title characters as they follow the soldiers around a battle-defaced Europe, selling them food, drink, clothing, and other bric-a-brac (mostly drink) to eke out a living. As jaundiced as Mother Courage’s view is of war, and as devoted as she is to her children, she remains economically dependent on it and, perversely, needs it to survive. She pays dearly for this in terms of the lives of her kids.”– John Michael Koroly “Seeing a director pay lip service to Brecht and all those tedious alienation theories has become a downtown cliché these days, and it’s rare to find one that truly gets it. David Herskovits does, and his Mother (in a fine translation by Ralph Manheim, with a lovely, lyrical score by Thomas Cabaniss) is the kind of production—full of off-beat humor and jolting changes in rhythm—that would make Bertolt proud.” – the Village Voice
“This
staging by the Target Margin company makes (Mother
Courage) live and reverberate with theatrical energy.”
“Mr. Herskovits’ scene-fracturing use of bells, microphones, imaginary walls and antic dances suggests a close study of Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group, but he has learned his lessons well.” - New York Times “The tale of a
New England Puritan whose faith in human virtue is shaken by
a walk in the woods with the devil…” “Erika Belsey’s set, consisting largely of rows of white sheets hung on clothes lines, is ingenious, as is Mr. Herskovits’s haunting use of Shaker-like dances (as opposed to his more familiar Bosch-like garden of sinners). Mr. Foreman mostly sidesteps Hawthorne’s rich prose (and his own trademark conundrums) for a more direct, simpler style, with sparks of idiosyncratic wit.” – New York Times “Hawthorne tells his
disturbing, ambiguous story in cool and measured prose, and
Herskovits emulates his style. Of all his productions I’ve
seen, this is the cleanest. (It’s also the biggest which
makes its simplicity all the more striking).”
“The
deliberate tension between Herskovits and Philip Johnston,
the composer, is as charged as that between Brown and the
Devil. Where the director is restrained, the composer is
generous. Where the story’s focus narrows, the music grows
more luxurious. The score is deceptive. Like Virgil Thomson,
Johnston lures his listeners with pretty melodies, folk
simplicity, and the occasional quotation.” “A classicist unafraid to screw around with a good thing, David Herskovits is one of downtown’s more interesting young directors.” - the Village Voice “…A wantonly magical rendering of Gertrude Stein’s rarely seen 1922 play. When you have what is by its very nature arbitrary spectacle, the only way to present it with any theatrical cogency is to emphasize the inner aesthetic logic of the piece, and that is what Target Margin Theater, under the febrile direction of David Herskovits, has done with profound exuberance, discipline, and painstakingly choreographed comic precision.” - the Village Voice “Under the direction of David Herskovits, a very game cast of 10 creates a whimsical hour that captures the intellectual humor of a piece that is perhaps better read than acted. Whether discoursing while eating bananas or jumping up and down asking “What do you know tablecloths?” the five men and five women (all of whom are dressed in skirt and jacket and wear pencil mustaches) throw themselves into the project to evoke a sort of erudite “Saturday Night Live” atmosphere.” – New York Times“Target Margin Theater’s poker-faced hipster David Herskovits, not one to be seen burning incense before the Bard’s altar, pulled off one of the most daring breach of convention with ignitingly good results. Condensing the First Folio, he hacked off the soliloquies and goaded us to run them in our minds as interior monologues (reprinted in the programs).” - the Village Voice “Occasionally, but only occasionally, a showcase production is exactly that – it shows off the talents of one or more actors or a director worth watching. Director David Herskovits’ Medea, for Target Margin Theatre, highlights both: Herskovits, for his vision of a 20th century Medea and what she does for love, and Caroline Clay, in the title role, who, when not burning up the stage with jealousy, is a one-woman dust storm as she kills her sons, plucks out the eyes of the servants of her enemy and exacts her revenge against her husband’s mistress.” – This Week on Stage “Jahnn’s text is poetic, almost mystical at points, and the Target Margin production wisely lets his poetry come out strong…The terrible strength of Medea’s remorseless revenge is well served by tight ensemble acting and ingenious stage devices, which occasionally call to mind the impenetrably detailed sets of Richard Foreman, who normally occupies the Ontological-St. Mark’s space”- TheaterWeek
“Brilliantly orchestrated by Mod classicist David Herskovits,
directing two dozen of Downtown performance’s finest.”
“A combination of lush spectacle and Renaissance torture methods…This production keeps up momentum by unabashedly juxtaposing moments of Grand Guignol humor and more serious ingredients of tragedy.” - TheaterWeek “Anyone in the mood for a refreshingly crass evening ought to rush down to “nada” to see David Herskovits’ Titus Andronicus. With a cast of 26, Shakespeare’s classic splasher isn’t exactly a natural for an inaugural showcase in a tiny space, but with uncommon sensitivity to occasion, Herskovits makes that fact work as a running gag.”- the Village Voice “In
this production, the first of his Target Margin Theater,
Director David Herskovits gets a good handle on the
outrageous tenor of the play by employing what has now
become the traditional vocabulary of post modern theater,
which comes off here as a combination of the lush spectacle
of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief… and a
dramatization of Michel Foucault’s classic dissection of
Renaissance torture methods, Discipline and Punish.
Most of the cast is dressed in bloody butcher aprons and
rubber gloves, and there is enough stage blood spattered on
the theater walls to make you think twice about taking a
seat.” “…there is something grand about doing a full-length, low-budget Shakespeare play with a cast of 24 in a playing space the size of a small studio apartment. The production, in fact, often spills out into the sidewalk as characters make full use of the entrance doors and perform in the two storefront windows.” – TheaterWeek “A finger in the eye of all those who think shoestring theater has to be small…I haven’t seen a group of unpaid people have this much fun onstage in a dog’s age.” - the Village Voice |
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