One has to wonder what propels an artist to pursue one idea at the expense of another, a question you may find yourself asking if you see the play Selection Day, currently being performed by a game cast at Theatre 54 at Shetler Studios in Midtown. The playwright, Paul Buzinski, whose previous works include Madrid […]
Warning: this is a bad one. I encourage you to just not contemplate going to see Carousel. Read my reviews (and see the productions) of Sound of Music, Oedipus Rex, Love’s Labour’s Lost or (ideally) The Last Wife instead. Is this the single most ridiculously terrible production I’ve reviewed on any stage at any budget […]
Quite unusually, I was handed an audiobook before sitting down to watch this show—I believe it was an audiobook of the show, or it may have been one of Sons and Lovers or The Rainbow which Phoenix Rising’s Paul Slack has found success in narrating. Regardless, it gives gives clues as to quality of the […]
In his director’s note for The Alchemist, Stratford Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino makes a preemptive strike against the argument that he should have set the early seventeenth century play in “our own era”, saying that it adds “a needless layer of complexity to an already challenging text”. Intriguing defensiveness aside, the problem with this statement […]
Before the show even started, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins immediately won me over. I was at the BCA, ready to watch a performance of appropriate, the New England premiere of the play and a SpeakEasy Stage Company production directed by M. Bevin O’Gara. In the program notes, Jacobs-Jenkins pointed out how revealing laughter can be as […]
As I toiled at my college dorm desk in December of 2006, cursing my political science methodology thesis, my classmates were breaking dorm policy by blaring music during quiet hours. Not just any music – the same iTunes playlist that had been on repeat all day. Most type A personalities would have been infuriated, but, […]
Edges is a musical with which I feel I should share some enduring connection, given attending an amateur production of it was one of the first experiences I had with university life. I recall the production being rather good, inspiring me, even, to get involved with the local university theatre society. However, in the years […]
The old art form known as commedia dell’arte appears infrequently in modern U.S. theatres. With masked, clown-like actors engaging in loud, brazen and eccentric sketches, commedia dell’arte relies heavily on lowbrow humor and audience participation to entertain, uninhibited by carefully scripted and staged material. When done well, commedia dell’arte can bring a smile to even […]