Friday, December 12, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") The national tour of Back to the Future: The Musical materialized onto the stage of the Saenger Theater this week and left wakes of la…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 02:18PM[SHARE]By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") The national tour of Back to the Future:The Musical materialized onto the stage of the Saenger Theater this week and left wakes of lau…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 12:41PM[SHARE]Saturday, November 22, 2025
By LOU HARRY Based on a documentary, The Queen of Versailles, the new Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino musical on Broadway at the St. James Theatre concerns an amoral, in-it-for-herse…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 11:04AM[SHARE]Monday, November 17, 2025
By LOU HARRY Musicals tend not to be humble. With rare exceptions, they announce themselves whether with well-known performers, high-profile source material, energetic dance, or visual spect…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 09:18AM[SHARE]Friday, November 14, 2025
By LOU HARRY Thanks to its notorious David Merrick-produced/Patti LuPone-starring died-on-the-road 1976 tryout, the Steven Schwartz/Joseph Stein musical "The Baker's Wife" landed a reputatio…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:37PM[SHARE]Sunday, November 9, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") At the beginning of Bess Wohi's play Liberation, the character of Lizzie breaks the fourth wall to greet the expectant audience. She m…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 10:01AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 21, 2025
'By LOU HARRY Instead of praising our goulash, They're appraising the plays of Willie Mays. In the original production of Dawn Yankees, that's a lyric sung by Meg Boyd and other neglected wi…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:48AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 18, 2025
By ROY BERKO The Notebook: The Musical tells the heart warming, and often heartbreaking life-long love story, of Allie and Noah.  It is based on a true tale inspired by author Nicholas…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 04:38AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 13, 2025
By SCOTTY BENNETT Hard to Say by Kyle Ayers is a stand-up comedy show about dealing with chronic " at times " nearly intractable pain. In Ayers' case, it is caused by a nerve disorder called…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 12:29PM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 13, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") When Arthur Miller debuted The Crucible in 1953, the nation was emerging from the dark and sinister times of accusations and recrimina…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 02:15AM[SHARE]Tuesday, August 12, 2025
By ANNE SIEGEL SPRING GREEN, Wis. " There's no better time for out-of-state visitors to head towards Wisconsin than right now. Some people might stay at campgrounds, others may find a secret…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:03AM[SHARE]Sunday, August 3, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Jamie Wax's play Call Me Izzy is set in Mansfield, Louisiana, some three to four hours away from where he grew up in Baton Rouge and N…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 11:11PM[SHARE]Thursday, July 31, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") It is perhaps most appropriate that for the third jewel in Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane's studded crown is Carousel, the Rodgers and…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 02:06PM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 23, 2025
By SCOTTY BENNETT Storytellers are artists who use a palette of verbal and physical effects to paint, in sound and motion, the picture the wordsmith creates in words on a page. David Dean Bo…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:56AM[SHARE]By ALAN SMASON This season's New Orleans Shakespeare Festival has been quite unusual. To begin with, the first of its two major productions wasn't even Shakespeare: it was Moliére and his f…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:15AM[SHARE]Monday, July 21, 2025
By LOU HARRY There are expectations that come when a play explicitly centers on death " particularly a play with a doom-and-gloom title such as the one attached to Noah Diaz's play You Will …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 09:37AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 19, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Julie Benko turned in a perfect performance as Eliza Doolittle in a concert version of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady opposite Broadw…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:14PM[SHARE]By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") It's taken ten years for the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans (TWTC) to unveil its first production of Tennessee Will…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 03:28PM[SHARE]Monday, July 14, 2025
By LOU HARRY After a few days at the Stratford Festival, I stopped in at the Shaw Festival for the first time in a dozen years. Visiting the festival and the charming town made me regret tho…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 10:27AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 12, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") When Company by Stephen Sondheim (and a book by Mark Furth) opened on Broadway in 1970 it was such a breath of fresh air and so unlike…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:51PM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 9, 2025
By LOU HARRY You don't need to go to an amusement park to have the feeling of riding a roller coaster. In Stratford, Ontario, you can acquire something akin to whiplash at a festival where y…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:34PM[SHARE]By SCOTTY BENNETT A famous line from the John Ford film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" is spoken by the newspaper reporter character, Maxwell Scott, near the end of the film, after heari…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:16PM[SHARE]Monday, July 7, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") In Pirates! The Penzance Musical, Rupert Holmes proves he knows how to take a popular hit, re-set it in an improbable location and…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 09:04AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 5, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") There are times when a local production company attempts to put on a treasured musical theatre piece and it collapses under the weight…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:14PM[SHARE]Monday, June 30, 2025
By ROY BERKO Like the old tale, my lord: "it is not so, nor `t was not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so." The intimate Beck's Studio Theatre is a perfect venue for meeting and gre…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:59AM[SHARE]By: SCOTTY BENNETT A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First is a gem of a play written, directed, and performed by Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland. This two-hander makes …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:35AM[SHARE]Saturday, June 28, 2025
By SCOTTY BENNETT One of the most famous opening lines of a novel is "Call me Ishmael." It is from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, a book many people are aware of but have never read. It is not…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 11:12AM[SHARE]Saturday, June 21, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Chicago "the longest running show now on Broadway and the second longest running show in history " made its way to the Saenger Theater…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:28AM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 17, 2025
˘By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Fats Waller, the very talented American singer and songwriter, lived an unfortunately short but prolific life, dying in 1943 at th…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:09AM[SHARE]Monday, June 16, 2025
EDWARD RUBIN, an iconoclastic theatre critic, arts critic and curator, who wrote for decades about theatre and the visual arts, died after a protracted battle with bladder cancer at Calvary …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:14PM[SHARE]Monday, June 9, 2025
The 2025 Tony Award winners were announced in ceremonies at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 8, hosted by Tony Award winner Cynthia Errivo. Maybe Happy Ending, a musical set in the futu…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 10:47AM[SHARE] 
