Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Halley Feiffer's new comedy, the obsessively titled "Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow," is an intermittently funny ten-minute parody of Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters." Unfortunatel…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:59PMTuesday, May 7, 2019
The Irish Repertory Theatre ends its thirtieth season by going back to the beginning, with a sturdy revival of Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars." An historical prequel to the other t…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 06:18PMTuesday, April 30, 2019
One of the theater's most skilled 19th-century melodramatists, Boucicault was uninterested in the finer points of history, character development, or narrative objectivity which, of course, i…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:58PMFriday, April 12, 2019
From this group of familiar faces, O'Reilly and Keating are particularly strong in their second go-around, finding notes in Jack and Joxer's codependent relationship that are both hilarious …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:20AMThursday, February 21, 2019
Director Ciarán O’Reilly handles O'Casey's abrupt tonal shifts well, transitioning from laughter to tears to horror with barely a hint of contrivance. A top-notch production team greatly …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:59PMThursday, January 17, 2019
Breen's script, a succession of rapid-fire vignettes divided in half by an unnecessary intermission, tries to compensate for its lack of depth with imagined multitudes. According to a promot…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:31PMTuesday, December 4, 2018
Although Chua is less interested in beauty for beauty's sake than Andersen, the look and sound of "The Emperor's Nightingale" is still stunning, drawing on a wealth of traditional Chinese ar…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:37AMTuesday, November 6, 2018
Many comic artists have noted that great humor often comes from great tragedy, though, inevitably, sometimes the latter overwhelms the former, and all you’re left with is a lot of indignat…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:09AMMonday, October 29, 2018
In Kate Tarker's satiric "Thunderbodies," America is a relentlessly strange place, where people spout nonsense, act without reason, and are led by the narcissistic man-baby they've elected p…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 08:52PMThursday, October 18, 2018
Along with excerpts from Godot and a couple of Beckett's novels, Irwin relies heavily on several "arcane" prose pieces from a collection Beckett dubbed "Texts for Nothing." Irwin was first i…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:30PMMonday, October 8, 2018
What our mothers owe us - and what we owe them - is at the heart of Leenya Rideout's one-woman autobiographical show, "Wild Abandon." In it, the prodigiously accomplished singer, songwriter,…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:22PMWednesday, September 26, 2018
In Craig Lucas’s "I Was Most Alive with You," two down-on-their-luck television writers mine recent personal tragedy for their latest project, hoping, with the Book of Job as their inspira…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 04:09PMSunday, September 16, 2018
Unfortunately, Worsham’s efforts just confirm the play’s central problem: only the relationship between June and Charlie has any real depth. As for the rest of the characters, although M…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:25PMMonday, July 30, 2018
In telling the rest of this shattering story, the creators of Comfort Women, inexplicably, rely heavily on musical theater conventions that result in wrongheaded, if not downright offensive,…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:04PMWednesday, July 25, 2018
But when things slow down a bit, especially during the musical interludes and longer dramatic pieces, Petosa’s eight performers -- four lead (Christine Hamel; Jake Murphy; Harrison Bryan; …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 04:15PMThursday, June 14, 2018
Shakespearean spoofs are almost as old as Shakespeare himself, dating back to at least the Restoration period. Although the vast majority has faded into history, there are still some real st…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:01AMTuesday, June 5, 2018
Unfortunately, O'Reilly’s heavy reliance on the production team is also indicative of a significant problem: the play is repetitive. Despite finding new, and often lovely, poetic ways to c…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:19AMMonday, May 14, 2018
There’s a brilliant play buried somewhere in Caryl Churchill’s "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire," a bottom-up historical epic about the English Civil War that the acclaimed British writ…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:42AMThursday, May 10, 2018
To be sure, there are examples of talented playwrights who have also been able to tread the boards without tripping over their feet, or tongues. Harold Pinter, Noël Coward, Tracy Letts: the…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:12AMThursday, April 26, 2018
Devised collaboratively by Patch of Blue, a London-based theater company, the play also benefits from a talented supporting cast. Alexandra Simonet makes Hannah’s caretaker fatigue evident…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:05PMFriday, April 13, 2018
But, unfortunately, Ferrentino squanders this intriguing setup, getting lost in existential musings that end up being nowhere near as complicated as her subject matter. The first signs of tr…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:41AMFriday, March 30, 2018
It’s impossible to discuss the history of modern Irish drama without reference to William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge, who, at the beginning of the last century, …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:45PMMonday, March 12, 2018
Just in time for Easter, TACT/The Actors Company Theatre has adapted and combined two Christmas-themed Damon Runyon short stories into the seasonally inappropriate, but nonetheless very ch…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:58PMTuesday, February 27, 2018
In the semi-autobiographical "Terminus," part of a seven-play cycle set in the fictional town of Attapulgus, Georgia, playwright Gabriel Jason Dean unleashes this intriguing Southern Gothic …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:32PMMonday, January 29, 2018
This comedy/drama/fitful musical also suffers from major tonal challenges, as it strains to push all of our emotional buttons. It’s a shame, because the cast gives it their all. Particular…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:48PMWednesday, January 24, 2018
And that’s essentially the problem with "A Kind Shot." Clocking in at 75 minutes, the “performance” feels more like a motivational speech than a theatrical event. It’s well-meaning a…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:44AMMonday, January 15, 2018
Another irony is that while Fury is kind of a bore, another character is not. Yeah, you guessed it. Him. When the president (David O. Friedman) appears in Fury’s bedroom like the Ghost of …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:27AMTuesday, December 19, 2017
Daniel LLewelyn-Williams in “A Regular Little Houdini” (Photo credit: Sheri Bankes) In 1905, the chief constable of the Newport, South Wales, police department declaimed the “impenetra…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 05:58PMThursday, December 7, 2017
Serving as both narrator and protagonist, Harris portrays Blue, a runaway slave who crossed the Sabine River from Louisiana to Texas in search of his elusive freedom. To tell us everything t…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:19AMWednesday, November 15, 2017
Adhering admirably to its cultural mission, Kairos Italy Theater is treating downtown audiences to a double-bill of smartly written Italian one-acts, each exploring the contentious topic of …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:31PMSunday, November 12, 2017
In their new rock musical "Billy and the Killers," lyricist/librettist Jim Shankman and composer Peter Stopschinski channel Nicholas Ray, David Lynch, Elvis Presley, and Dashiell Hammett to …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:26AM 
