Chris Kompanek

Mike Bartlett's buzzed about new play, Cock, from the Royal National Theatre opened to a thunderous and mostly deserved standing ovation at the Duke Thursday night. The intimate one-act focuses on the shitstorm that evolves out of a young man's inability to choose between his longtime male lover, M (Jason...

It's been a busy month on the culture front, and I've neglected this blog. Since I last wrote here, a lot has gone down in the music, theater and film worlds. The beginning of the month saw the Magnetic Fields play a graceful, almost stately show at the Beacon Theater,...

It's heartening that one of the hottest theater tickets of the season is a word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Running eight hours and absent of any special effects, Gatz is the polar opposite to Spider-Man and other sensationalist fare that permeates not just Broadway but often...

New Yorker events are always a treat, so when I heard Editor-in-Chief David Remnick was hosting a panel featuring the magazine's younger generation of cartoonists a couple weeks back, It was an easy invite to accept. The evening (pretty short at just over an hour) was made up mostly of...

I never quite understood the thrill of Blu-ray until I watched Criterion's new release of Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour. The film made an indelible impression on me when I saw it as a teenager and fueled my exploration of the director's more absurd gem's, including The Discreet Charm of...

Identity is at the heart of two superb but very different plays currently running off-Broadway: Athol Fugard's Blood Knot and Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One. The former was first performed in Johannesburg, South Africa more than 50 years ago, which was a decade before the playwright of the latter...

Jeff Mangum's big return to New York the other week followed sold-out sets at last year's All Tomorrow's Parties. Adding to the anticipation, Mangum aka Neutral Milk Hotel hasn't actively toured in over a decade, leaving his fans to replay In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as they strung together...

My main experience with Porgy and Bess has been listening to the Miles Davis album. I first came across it soon after discovering Miles early in high school and like many of his albums, I can pick it up after years absence and hear something new.

Being so familiar...

I'm not sure what my expectations were when I went to Southwest Virginia for a week a few months back. The only part of Virginia I had glimpsed before was Arlington, which, as one native told me, is worlds away from the sliver of the state that's closer to Tennessee,...

It's that time of year again. You've probably done most of your holiday shopping, but for those procrastinators, here's a collection of my favorite gifts I've received this year. From epic CD and DVD collections to cool little gadgets, it's been a good year for both pop and high culture....

Sometimes theater thrives on the simplest pleasures. A couple actors on a bare stage. This was the case at the last event for Carnegie Hall's young donor group, the Notables. Of course, it helps when those two actors are Alec Baldwin and Renee Fleming who both exude an effortless charm...

With all the traveling I've been doing, I've fallen behind on recording my cultural happenings for this blog. What follows are snapshots of my cultural experiences from the past month.

In The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Mike Daisey draws a complex portrait of the late Apple titan he...

Downtown storytelling group The Moth made their Town Hall debut Wednesday night with a thoroughly moving show celebrating the timeless nature of this simple art form and the life of monologist Spalding Gray.

Garrison Keillor hosted the event with his usual understated charm as he introduced the diverse lineup...

Sometimes the best way embrace a new season is to jump right in. With that in mind, I took off the other week for Sweden where the weather hovered around a balmy 45 degrees and there was always a chance of rain. Arriving very early on a Monday morning (ahead...

Craft Beer Week often becomes a blur of awesomeness as one brew flows freely into the next, and the precise event locations fade from memory. Where did you have that aggressively hoppy IPA that felt like a thrilling battle of wills to finish or what was the name of that...

Love is perhaps the most universal and constant through-line in literature and drama, so it's not surprising that three very different shows that opened this week deal with it in depth from the joys of young love to the bitter resentment that grows as it matures and even the heartache...

It turns out being stuck in the city for Labor Day weekend isn't so bad after all. I started Saturday evening out with a friend at the West Village outpost of Flex Mussels, a mini-chain from Canada's Prince Edward Island. The sparse steel décor contrasted with vivid paintings of the...

Sitting just off of Columbus Circle on Central Park South, Michael White's Italian seafood mecca Marea evokes the understated glamour of the Upper West Side of a couple decades ago. Clean lines and subtle lighting put you at ease as does the bar, which serves up powerful cocktails like the...

Hidden away in the Bryant Park Hotel, the swanky sushi resto Koi provides a tranquil counterpart to the bustle of midtown traffic outside its door. The cavernous space fills two levels with plush seating in muted colors, and provides ample space between tables that creates the illusion of private dining....

There's something very different about music festivals as opposed to concerts. Beyond the obvious, there's a range of factors that affect the experience. Some are tangible such as the location, number of people, sound quality, and length of beer lines, but others are harder to pin down. Even with a...