By Eva Phillips Mob bosses. Murderous fathers. Ill-fated romance. Deceit and chicanery. Florida. Moliere. If these somewhat incongruous elements seem like a combustive recipe for intrigue an…
Tennessee Williams is a master of diffusely permeating the social consciousness and cultural lexicon. His inimitable style is why his works are held in the esteemed canon for theatre and fil…
In 1999, at the zenith of my adolescent paranoia that was fixated on the imminent cataclysm of Y2K, a film called Blast From the Past spoke to me and my fretfulness. The film centered around…
Pittsburgh Festival Opera, our local “Intimate Opera Theater,” has added much to the summers’ musical offerings for some years now, and the ambitious company’s new season begins F…
By Linda Harkcom Last weekend I was assigned to cover Split Stage’s production of Titanic The Musical at The Lamp Theatre in Irwin. I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about the show, o…
By Eva Phillips Gone with the Wind was the perfect storm of an unfathomably successful novel, insatiable industry hype, and the biggest names (and egos) in Hollywood in one tempestuous press…
A Letter from the Editor, Well, y’all, we’ve fought our way tooth and nail to the golden promise land of Summer. The Spring saw some phenomenal changes and growth for all of us at PGH…
Monsters are real. Danger can happen. And theatre as we know it will never be the same. Don’t fret. This isn’t some Orson Welles-esque announcement warning of Godzilla’s doomed fora…
Pittsburgh is a city that is proverbially filled to brim with theatre companies and artistic collectives. Which is by no means a gripe—that there are well over twenty theatre companies, a …
Kinetic Theatre is one of the few companies in Pittsburgh that prospers on the nomadic model. Helmed by tireless and resourceful Producing Artistic Director Andrew Paul, who has directed all…
Oklahoma! at Pittsburgh CLO (June 21st-June 30th at the Benedum) I have a morbid fascination with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 Musical Oklahoma! (their first ever musical collaboration, …
Soulful tributes to some of the world’s most beloved–and sometimes enigmatic–singers are the artistic specialty of Daphne Alderson. Aptly described as a chanteuse, Alderson far ex…
For over thirty years, Point Park University has hosted International Summer Dance, a six-week intensive program offering conservatory style training to students in Ballet, Jazz, and Mode…
By Linda Harkcom The Pittsburgh CLO is putting the fun in musical theater this summer by producing the hilarious Spamilton An American Parody at the Greer Cabaret Theater in Pittsburgh. I re…
By Eva Phillips A surreal comparative train of thought I often entertain is pondering the striking differences between my father’s world and my own. When I turned 21 in 2012, I was paying …
By Eva Phillips Imagine the most elaborate world you can. Think of “elaborate” in this context in its strictest biological meaning—producing a new substance from original constituents …
By Eva Phillips The complexities and nuances of Shakespeare’s tremendous tragedy Richard III are apparent to even those uninitiated to Shakespeare’s antics. Grandiloquent as it is intri…
By Eva Phillips Two fundamental queries for any devoted theatre-goer or dramaturgically-minded individual should be “what does it mean to be a playwright” and “what constitutes a play?…
Point Park University’s $74 million theater complex Downtown will be paying dividends during its second season of operation this fall. The shiny new space attracted one of the school’…
By Chloe Kinnahan Attack Theatre has once again pushed the limits of movement, objects, and space in their latest performance, The Rube Goldberg Variations at the New Hazlett. Combining insp…
By Cayleigh Boniger There are some plays that are easy to distill into what is essentially a single essence: family drama, crisis of identity, agit prop. Paula Vogel’s Indecent, performe…
For the last offering of a season that seems to have just begun, Pittsburgh Opera will present Donizetti’s melodious and comic Don Pasquale – an 1834 opera buffa with a 1950’s Hollywoo…
Our teenage years are our most tempestuous and our most formative. We take advantage of our diminished inhibitions, delighting in perhaps reckless behavior. At the same time, we find ourselv…
By Brian Pope In The Burdens, Jane and Mordy Berman’s bond as siblings is only as strong as their network connection. She’s a working mother on one coast. He’s a starving artist on ano…
By Laura Caton Day three of Fringe Festival started off completely differently than any previous Fringe. Because it started in my home. Which isn’t to say I don’t usually start these day…