Thursday, December 7, 2017
Never match wits with a master. That is to say, when reviewing a genius wit like Oscar Wilde (and who is there like him?), don’t try to be witty yourself. You can’t measure up.
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:25PMMonday, December 4, 2017
You may get that the title, “Love, Love, Love,” is borrowed from the Beatles’ song where it is insistently celebrated as “all we need.” But the sour intelligence in Mike Bartlett�…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 04:31PMSunday, November 19, 2017
Thanksgiving came early – and also Christmas and any other family-gathering holiday on your immediate horizon. But Stephen Karam’s disarmingly titled “The Humans” at the Pittsburgh P…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:05PMTuesday, October 24, 2017
At the end, it isn’t just the famous young lovers who die, but also those interesting supporting roles in which Shakespeare specialized, the frantic, babbling Mercutio, fiery Tybalt and, i…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 05:40PMTuesday, October 3, 2017
There’s safety in the familiar, right? It’s 1955. Seven men gather to share stories and drink beer in Charlesetta’s coloreds-only roadside bar, a rough-cut place out in the woods somew…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 01:27PMWednesday, August 23, 2017
Early on in Sean Christopher Lewis’ “Red Hills,” the western academic expects to talk about what’s happened.
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 06:30AMWednesday, August 16, 2017
English playwright Caryl Churchill is a modern master, and her “Cloud 9” (1979) is a wonderful play; you could call it a modern classic. That makes the staging by the small, preprofessio…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 07:00AMFriday, August 11, 2017
Friday, August 4, 2017
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario – Things always seem the same in this lovely little town with its big theater festival, but they’re always different, too.
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 02:34PMWednesday, July 19, 2017
Can you really have too much of a good thing — even of a very, very good thing?
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AMSunday, June 25, 2017
Mark Rylance is coming back to pursue a passion. The award-winning actor, director and activist will help celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Homestead here with a performance �…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AM Mark Rylance was born in England in 1960 and brought up in the U.S. (primarily Wisconsin), 1962-78. He returned to England to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AMTuesday, May 23, 2017
By any other name, the postindustrial wastes outside Elizabeth, N.J., might well be (insert familiar Western Pennsylvania steel town of your choice). So you settle in for a gritty drama of c…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AMSunday, May 21, 2017
From its start some 14 years ago, Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre (Mark Southers, founder and artistic director) has attracted most attention for its loving attention to August Wilson. But it…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 03:00PMThursday, May 11, 2017
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Classics come in many dimensions and flavors, but they should always be engaging, no matter how familiar, and also reveal something new.
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AMThursday, April 27, 2017
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Whizz! Bang! It’s off to the races with a comic chase scene, our hero pursued by an unmistakable Josef Stalin, one of the all-time monsters in the Hall of Despots, trying to brain him with…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AMSaturday, April 1, 2017
And now for the granddaddy of them all, Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex”! It’s not literally the oldest play in the western canon, but it’s the one most people know, the distant ancestor o…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 03:51PMFriday, March 24, 2017
LONDON — The blockbuster here is “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” as big since it opened last July as “Hamilton” is on Broadway, with tickets sold out more than a year in advan…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 01:52PMWednesday, March 22, 2017
In Jessica Dickey’s witty and absorbing new play, “The Guard,” we are referred constantly to an unseen painting: Rembrandt’s famous “Aristotle With [or Contemplating] a Bust of Hom…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 01:28PMSaturday, March 4, 2017
Pittsburgh is blessed in its two big college theater programs, Carnegie Mellon and Point Park, which each year send dozens of graduates into the national professional pool.
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 07:03PMFriday, March 3, 2017
What else would there be but rain, this being the west coast of Ireland, the setting for “The Beauty Queen of Leenane”? It falls steadily throughout the first scene and again at the end,…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:23AMTuesday, February 14, 2017
Take the exploitation of black America during Reconstruction, structure it with metaphoric parallels to the science of mechanics, interweave quotations from dozens of contemporary sources, t…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 03:14PMTuesday, February 7, 2017
“And thus,” says Feste, the professional fool presiding over the “Twelfth Night” festivities, “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AMMonday, January 23, 2017
NEW YORK — Frederick August Kittel, Jr. always said “my father very rarely came around.” He grew up in the cultural environment of his mother, Daisy Wilson, which is why, when his fath…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 02:45PMWednesday, January 11, 2017
Choosing the Post-Gazette Performer of the Year is never easy, and in the award’s 33rd edition, it was especially challenging. In 2016, audiences saw a number of superb ensembles at Pittsb…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AMFriday, December 23, 2016
The New Year on Pittsburgh stages kicks off with “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” -- one of the best plays of the decade -- arriving at the Benedum Center on Jan. 3.
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 11:44AMMonday, December 12, 2016
As the title initially suggests, “Lungs” has a lot of words. Director Spencer Whale starts it with a silent interpretive dance that in hindsight you realize epitomizes the story’s gene…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 11:33PMWednesday, November 30, 2016
Which of your senses would you give up first? Granted, the five enhance each other. But taste — that would be first to go, right? Then feeling — even with all the physical danger that wo…
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 12:00AM 
