In years past I have seen several plays performed in foreign (to me) languages. “Death of a Salesman” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” both familiar works, were perfectly clear in Yiddish,…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 09:39PMVivian Bearing, PhD, a college professor of 17th-Century poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, is undergoing chemotherapy for stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer. Fifty ye…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:23PMTheater lore abounds with tales of understudies who have gone on to a degree of stardom, some as a direct result of having filled in for an indisposed performer. Shirley Maclaine, who subbed…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:30PMSeveral terrific performances in the current Broadway revival of “Company” owe their provenance to its gender-switched casting. Originally about NYC bachelor Robert/Bobby being feted on …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 06:02PMHow do you improve on perfection? Well, you can’t – by definition. But you can approach it from a different direction, which is what David Lindsay-Abaire has done in adapting his marvelo…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:06PMAll eleven outstanding onstage performers (six singer-dancers and five musicians) are at the top of their game, but the biggest stars of “Cheek to Cheek: Irving Berlin in Hollywood” are …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:06PMAt the intermission of “Morning’s at Seven,” directed by Dan Wackerman in revival at the Theatre of St. Clement’s, I mentioned to my companion that Paul Osborne’s 1940 comedy, whic…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 08:39PMThe Axelrod Performing Arts Center in Deal Park, New Jersey has emerged from Covid lockdown with a stylish and engaging production of “A Bronx Tale,” the full-scale musical version of Ch…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 12:05PMIt is no knock on A. R. Gurney’s much-admired “Love Letters” to note that “Ken Ludwig’s Dear Jack, Dear Louise” takes Gurney’s premise and runs with it…literally. Gurney has …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:17PMIn his very fine book “A Lifetime with Shakespeare” (McFarland), about having directed all of Shakespeare’s plays, the late Paul Barry postulated that casting is eighty-five percent …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 09:06PMHenry VIII wasted no time embarking on his multiple-marriage mission. Just weeks after assuming the English throne at age 19 in 1509, he wed number one of six, Catherine of Aragon, his older…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:30PMWhen’s the last time you heard a Dumb Blond joke? Me neither, until Robert Dubac pulled one early in “The Book of Moron,” his solo comedic commentary in a limited engagement through Oc…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:22PMTradition holds that Queen Elizabeth I, enamored of Sir John Falstaff from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, asked the playwright to depict that character in love, and that he complied, writin…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 07:17PMIn calendar year 2014 I saw four different productions of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” In all of them, and six or eight others over the years, Lear and his daughter Cordelia [spoiler ale…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:20PMAs ‘S Wonderful as “Who Could Ask for Anything More? The Songs of George Gershwin” is as it stands, and it truly is, I would suggest one change: adding George’s principal lyricist, h…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 08:43PMConsidering, as Rehena Mirza’s disembodied voice intones in her segment of “A Dozen Dreams,” that nothing is more boring than hearing about someone else’s dream, you would think a ga…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:36AMWhat might you be doing one month past your ninety-first birthday? For John Cullum, who achieved that milestone in March, the answer was a sort of fallback plan: Two years earlier, the vener…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:43PMThe 1955 Broadway musical “Damn Yankees” was based on Douglass Wallop’s novel “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant” (to the lowly Washington Senators). A Broadway revival of “D…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 12:21PMAnyone interested in learning how to turn a negative into a positive might want to contact the folks at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. For the past nine years, BSC’…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:23PMA play-writing recipe: Stir together equal parts racial tension, economic uncertainty, labor-management unrest, and class distinction. Fold in a smattering of unprovoked violence. Bake under…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:37PMIn the recent months that restrictions have eased in some relatively low-affected areas, I have tracked down three theatrical attractions (all with COVID-19 protocols in place). In August it…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:29PMI have long been aware of the existence of Hudson Guild Theatre Company, but until I was encouraged to watch their virtual world-premiere production of “A Five Mile Radius,” I had never …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 07:26PMHaving performed years ago in theaters tucked away in tourism towns across the country, my very first sighting of Weathervane Theatre in Whitefield, New Hampshire inspired a déjà vu rush. …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:55PM“Not to put any pressure on you, but the entire American theater is depending on you to be smart.” Thus spoke Kate Shindle, president of Actors Equity, to the cast of “Godspell,” the…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:33PMRuben Santiago-Hudson’s “Your Blues Ain’t Sweet Like Mine” premiered at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey in 2016. The cast (with one replacement) re-assembled last week for …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 09:08PMHow’s this for minimalism: Playwright Duncan Macmillan’s instructions for the staging of “Lungs” specifies a bare stage with no scenery, no furniture, no props, no mime and no costum…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:42PMSince its premiere in 1949, when it won all six of its Tony Award nominations (and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” has had four Broadway revivals, …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:22PMA column by Ginia Bellafante in the Metropolitan Section of the Sunday May 31 New York Times about last week’s Central Park incident between bird-watcher Christian Cooper, who is black…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:06PMWith no Theatre to cover due to this nasty fellow… …I’ll share a few excerpts from “It’s Better Than The Movie,” my work-in-progress anecdotal memoir: July 1956: I was an apprent…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:26PMAll ten of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle plays are not created equal, but just as the non-star players on a championship team are essential to its success, so are all the plays in…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:45PMComposer-lyricist Meredith Willson’s 1960 musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” was inspired by an exaggerated tale about the exploits of real-life Titanic survivor Margaret Tobin Brown…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:42PM
