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Theater fans are anticipating Nearly Naked Theatre's upcoming production of Spring Awakening, but I'll venture that nothing else the company does this year will surpass its...
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Not far from where I sit typing this, theater people are wringing their hands. That's what I picture, anyway: The folks at Actors Theatre, pacing and moaning and occasionally...
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Tolstoy was right: It's more fun watching people be miserable. And so we have David Mamet, the American playwright who has brought us the delightful anguish of Oleanna (in...
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In Bill Harris' Stories About the Old Days, an elderly man and woman stand in an old church and recount their lives. They bemoan the passing of time and the ways in which the...
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Stray Cat Theatre has kicked off its 10th season with a meandering mess of dramatic devices masquerading as a play. A murder mystery of sorts, The Sparrow has broken wings. The...
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We were, as we do most Saturday nights, dressing for theater.
"Why does this shirt look so nice on the hanger," I asked my spouse, "and so dumpy on me?"
"I don't know," he...
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Things were looking up, even before Nearly Naked Theatre's Oedipus for Kids! commenced on opening night. It's always nice to open a playbill and read that Johanna Carlisle is...
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My visit to Hale Center Theatre last week marked the fifth production of Little Shop of Horrors I've seen in a decade — no surprise there, as this show is a musical...
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The nice people at Arizona Broadway Theatre sent someone to lecture me about the way I review theater. Apparently, my last review of an ABT show included a fart joke and the...
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Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan's Hairspray is, I've decided, made of Teflon. It would appear that nothing can hurt this oft-produced musical version of the 1988 John Waters...
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Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella has an interesting pedigree. Originally seen as a live television broadcast in 1957, this three-act musical was viewed by the largest...
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As we were leaving for a matinee this past Sunday, my spouse said to me, "This has got to be the low point in your career." It was hard to argue with him, but I was hopeful...
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Paul Bartel's musicalization of his 1982 black comedy, Eating Raoul, is a blast. This is an excellent example of a musical theater subgenre that has dogged the stage ever since...
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My friend Ruth Beaumont often says, "If the play is boring, you can always just stare at the stage décor." Unfortunately for me, the set for Stray Cat Theatre's Abraham...
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You know the economy's in the toilet when the state's largest professional theater is presenting a rerun. The Mystery of Irma Vep, the rather beautiful and amply staged Charles...
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In Venice, I've looked for evidence of movies I've seen that are set there. I'm always peeking into shop windows, looking for the timepiece Capucine brings to Rex Harrison in...
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I have seen Theatre Artists Studio's Lenin's Embalmers, and, oh, the wisecracks I could make about dead comedies and performances by walking corpses.
I'll refrain. But I will...
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Grey Gardens: The Musical is not for everyone. One's ability to truly enjoy this camp musical depends on one's knowledge of (and affection for) the documentary on which it's...
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Last Thursday night, shortly before the curtain rose on Arizona Theatre Company's Sex and the Second City Version 2.0, a young woman approached me and the three other theater...
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A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of fictional Walter Lee Younger, a black man in 1950s Chicago who represents the social transition of black men and women during the middle...
