144 stories by "Dr. Mark Dreisonstok"
"Anything Goes," courtesy of the Good Shepherds Players. The Cole Porter musical "Anything Goes" was to have run two weekends in March at Good Shepherds Players, part of the annual tradition…
"The show must go on!" So runs an old dictum in the theatre world, but how do theatre companies survive and thrive in the era in which we find ourselves? Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, V…
Bel Cantanti's world premiere production of "Briscula the Magician" is magical indeed; it combines modernistic, often atonal, operatic music with political observations about the past which …
The Puppet Co.'s current production of "Beauty and the Beast" is not a recreation of the 1991 Disney animated version, and there are no enchanted teapots and candlesticks to make childre…
During the Romantic Age, composers in the German-speaking world set to music many of the era's greatest poems in the German language. An outstanding example is "Dichterliebe," or "A Poet…
In the Mel Brooks' film "The Producers" and the Broadway musical which it inspired, Max Bialystock, an erstwhile top Broadway producer, and Leo Bloom, a tax accountant living the kind of…
"Mary Stuart" " or more properly, "Maria Stuart" " is one of the key works of Friedrich Schiller and the German theatre, and audiences have a rare opportunity to experience this great drama …
The ancient Roman poet Ovid tells the tale of the sculptor Pygmalion who creates his ideal of a woman in the medium of a statue. In George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" and the Lerner and Loewe…
Rockville Little Theatre is a company with a varied repertoire. Their newest show is author John Bishop’s “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940," a production that i…
The tale of Pygmalion, the master sculptor who creates a statue of his idolized woman Galatea and has Venus bring it to life, was told by the Roman poet Ovid in his work the "Metamorphoses."…
"Charley's Aunt" was a popular feature in the mid-twentieth century. It was a vehicle for comedy legend Jack Benny in a movie version, and it subsequently became a Broadway musical, "Where's…
"Miss Saigon" is deployed in its current tour of duty at the Kennedy Center, and it is nothing short of a magnificent victory — unlike the situation of the last days of the ill-fated c…
This Christmas season, as in all others since its 1843 publication, Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is in vogue. What makes this season perhaps a little different is that many versions …
And so Bugs Bunny, "The Rabbit of Seville" posing as a barber on the operatic stage, rubs the hair tonic "Figaro Fertilizer" on Elmer Fudd's baldpate, and the latter reacts in comic fury whe…
It is colonial Salem, Massachusetts, in the year 1692, at the height of the witchcraft hysteria. "If you refuse to answer this court, then by the Statute you will be condemned to have yo…
The Twin Beach Players have had a world premiere on their hands over the past few weeks " "The Time Machine" by Mark Scharf, based on the science-fiction novel by H.G. Wells. Wells was a…
The past few years have not been kind to circuses. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus " the self-styled "Greatest Show on Earth" — closed recently after 146 years i…
Are you ready for the ghosts of Halloween? Audiences generally think of ghosts today as ghoulish staples in terrifying stories and frightening films. Yet there was a time when ghosts…
“On February 28, 1815, the three-masted Pharaon arrived at Marseilles from Smyrna, commanded by the first mate, young Edmond Dantès, the captain having died on the voyage. He had left…
