The summer air has begun to cool down, but With Somebody Who Loves Me, an independent production by Manzo Entertainment, is heating up the Tarragon. A shortened version of the dance spectacle just completed a successful run at this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival, where the cast of eight dancers played to packed and enthusiastic houses […]
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in response to McCarthyism in the 1940s-50s, and it is appropriately infuriating. Responding to the communist witch hunt that was targeting writers like himself, Miller wrote a piece that would become one of the most widely produced American plays in history, about an actual witch hunt. He uses the 1692 […]
I love Andrew Lloyd Webber; his shows are always big, colorful and dramatic. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat calls for a ton of small characters- eleven brothers, eleven wives, an entire children’s chorus. So, I was intrigued by the idea of a production of Joseph in a black box that advertised a small cast […]
Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, 2312, is pretty frakking great. Sci-fi cussing aside, the novel’s very well executed and quite beautiful. 2312 is a futuristic exploration of human expansion into the rest of the solar system, and focuses on Swan Er Hong (an artist from colonized Mercury), and her attempts to unravel the weird events […]
Come Back, Little Sheba is a disjointed play. During the first act, it feels like a trivial tragedy not tragic enough to earn that description. The characters are fretting losers with problems so superficial that it’s remarkable how easy they would be to fix. Marie: date nicer boys (and try just one at a time); […]
“I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?” -Benedick to Beatrice (IV.i) The 2012 Stratford season isn’t very good. 80% of the reason I say that is Much Ado About Nothing. There are places to improve Henry V, Charlie Brown, The Matchmaker and so much else, but they […]
Oliver Stone’s Savages is his best work in years. Or so the poster says. Given the slump Stone has been in since 2004’s epic failure Alexander, that’s not saying much. The film has been adapted from a book with the same name. I have not read the book and seeing the film did not encourage me […]
Present Laughter isn’t particularly remarkable. It’s a pretty standard Shaw production despite being written by Noel Coward and not George Bernard Shaw (who only wrote two plays slated for the 2012 season, actually). The costumes are pretty, the set is impressive if not interesting and everybody has British accents. Shaw’s Festival Theatre is a typical proscenium arch- […]