Oscar Isaac

If you want to see Guillermo del Toro’s no-expense-spared adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this Halloween, you’ll have to hope that you’re living in a major city with an arthouse cinema. That is because, as part of the Faustian deal that Netflix strikes with the filmmakers whom it gives blank checks to realize their dream projects, the pictures that they make get only the most token of cinematic releases before they are sent onto the streaming service, there to become part of the algorithm for all eternity.

The Sign in Sidney Brunstein’s Window — set in the blustering world of 1960s New York bohemia — deals with so many hot-button issues it is hard to keep up. Patriarchy, anti-Semitism, gay rights, slavery, sex work, suicide, drugs, adultery, racism. It’s all there.  But as I watched Anne Kauffman’s superb, and at times transcendent, Broadway revival, it dawned on me that one theme unites them all: corruption.  The play’s moment of truth hangs on the revelation that a local Manhattan politician who preaches progress is actually a crook. But on a smaller, equally devastating level, it is also about the corruption of marriage, of bodies, of values, of morals and of hope.