Sunday, September 25, 2022
This piece is prompted by the current Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” which I am scheduled to see on October 12. Neither a review nor an analysis, it is just…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:27PMFriday, September 9, 2022
“Strings Attached” is about three physicists, an American woman and two British men, on their way by train from Cambridge to London to see Michael Frayn’s science-based play “Copenha…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:23PMTuesday, August 30, 2022
An esteemed scholar once wrote about “Waiting for Godot” that “We all bring to Samuel Beckett’s play whatever is uppermost in our minds.” As tidy as that seems, my “Godot” expe…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:58PMTuesday, August 16, 2022
Mrs. Nugent should have quit while she was ahead. When she went to the Brady home to complain that her son Philip was being bullied by Francie Brady, Francie’s ma was ready to punish him. …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:05PMTuesday, July 26, 2022
Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” reportedly his own personal favorite, has weathered so many revivals and revisions since its 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning premiere that all…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:18PMThursday, July 21, 2022
It’s a common refrain in the city: Chicago summer is so worth the wait. Newbies and transplants can feel the buzz of opportunity in the air when the weather starts to turn. Visceral summer…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:30PMMonday, July 18, 2022
It is fascinating to imagine the processes that went into mounting the Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.” Not only Stephen Sondheim’s exquisite music and lyrics and James Lapine’s…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:31PMTuesday, July 5, 2022
As written for MediaNews Group in Michigan: However you define Power Couple, you will not find a more representative theatrical pair than actor Colm Feore and director-choreographer Donna Fe…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 08:55AMThursday, June 9, 2022
From 1968 to 1973, “SOUL!,” America’s first Black-hosted nighttime TV talk show, celebrated Black literature, poetry, music and politics, largely in interview formats. In 1971, prolifi…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:11PMThursday, June 2, 2022
One of my favorite theater memories is of seeing Phil Silvers in “Do Re Mi” in 1960. In a scene where his character is producing a recording session, Silvers tells the six on-stage music…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:06PMMonday, May 16, 2022
There are many reasons for taking a date to a community theater production of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Maybe you are both studying English Lit or are enrolled in acting classe…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 07:49PMTuesday, May 3, 2022
The following article appears in the May edition of the Canadian national Mensa magazine, MC2, and online and in the print editions of MediaNews Group in suburban Detroit. One hundred…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:10AMMonday, April 11, 2022
Between 1961 and Y2K, Neil Simon was represented on Broadway by thirty plays, winning four Tony Awards (one honorary) and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (“Lost in Yonkers”). The plays…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:45PMThursday, March 3, 2022
Think about the last ten new plays you saw. Were most of them really well written, with cohesive plots and well-developed characters? Were they thought-provoking and/or amusing? Well, that a…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:51PMTuesday, February 22, 2022
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 09:39PMSunday, January 9, 2022
Vivian 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 04:23PMWednesday, December 29, 2021
Theater 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 05:30PMMonday, December 20, 2021
Several 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 06:02PMTuesday, December 14, 2021
How 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 05:06PMThursday, December 2, 2021
All 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 11:06PMMonday, November 15, 2021
At 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 08:39PMTuesday, November 9, 2021
The 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 12:05PMThursday, November 4, 2021
It 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 02:17PMTuesday, October 19, 2021
In 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 09:06PMFriday, October 8, 2021
Henry 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 04:30PMTuesday, September 7, 2021
When’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 05:22PMMonday, August 9, 2021
Tradition 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 07:17PMMonday, July 26, 2021
In 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 04:20PMSunday, June 27, 2021
As ‘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 08:43PMMonday, May 17, 2021
Considering, 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 11:36AMMonday, April 12, 2021
What 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 02:43PM 
