1,395 stories by "Tony Frankel"
CAESAR THE MOMENT Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare's best known and most oft-quoted plays, chronicling the political and moral crisis of Brutus and his fellow conspirators as they plot to…
SANTINO AND SETH Get ready, kids. This Sunday, February 21, 2021 at 8 (LIVE!) and Monday at 3 (EST), the gregarious, gadfly Seth Rudetsky will have as his guest Santino Fontana. Seth " accom…
NOT SO LITTLE ANYMORE On February 2, 2021, A Little New Music continues its "Spotlight Series" with the music of multi-talented composer/lyricist Rob Rokicki of The Lightning Thief: The Perc…
NEED A REASON TO WATCH GREAT ONLINE CONCERTS? HERE'S Y. Beginning Monday February 1, 2021, NYC's 92Y is presenting quite the cavalcade of concerts. From Emanuel Ax to Richard Goode and Danii…
CONNECTING ALL CORNERS OF THE WORLD Here comes Films.Dance, an extremely ambitious and most promising global project from one of the hottest leaders in dance. This stunningly shot series exi…
RAILING AGAINST DEPRESSION Being a lover of railroads, especially railroad travel, I still remember this absorbing documentary from PBS's American Experience. Back in 1998, I learned of the …
NEW SEASON TAKES CENTER COURT Chicago's great Court Theatre has sadly had to postpone its production of August Wilson's Two Trains Running, but Owen McCafferty's Titanic (Scenes from the Bri…
PERSONALIZING DIASPORA Perhaps one of the reasons more people aren't wearing masks in the U.S. to protect themselves and others during the COVID pandemic is that, even with 369,000 deaths to…
WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND LAYS AHEAD If you think Carl Sagan's Cosmos is mind-blowing, or the way Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. could put history into context is dumbfounding, or Thomas Friedman's Th…
THIS TIME, IT'S A PLAGUE THAT CAUSED THE RAT Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical. Notice in the title that there is no mention of Disney. You know, the folks behind the terrific Pixar 2007 film …
A WORLD APART FROM TYPICAL VIRTUAL FARE Like a breath of fresh air, Jason Robert Brown's Songs for a New World far exceeded my expectations of both virtual theater and Brown's uneven s…
I HOPE THE FUTURE IS MORE EXCITING THAN THIS The Geffen Playhouse is forging ahead as Geffen Stayhouse, offering another magic show disguised as theater. Following the phenomenal success of …
HOLY CLOSET! Whereas many theater companies are becoming experimenters with video during the COVID-19 shutdown, Theater in Quarantine has been actually transforming theater into a small s…
A JEWEL OF A PLAY Forgive me dear reader for the terse review, but I discovered something yesterday that turned out to be the holiday present you never expected but later realized it was som…
STORAGE RUN = VIRTUAL FUN Pee-Wee's Playhouse meets Choose Your Own Adventure meets classic holiday fare in this new, interactive holiday experience from Rogue Artists Ensemble, one of the c…
THIS STREETCAR ROLLS AND HUMS WITH AUTHENTICITY Since struggle for power among the classes is one of the main themes in Tennessee Williams' still-shocking A Streetcar Named Desire, it makes …
THE BIG SLEEP No crime is as duplicitous as The Geffen's latest zoom-as-theater project Citizen Detective. This is the point that I say "spoiler alert" but a) nothing I do can spoil this int…
A FEAST FOR THE IMAGINATION I have seen three shows from the Chicago-based performance collective Manual Cinema, and the theatricality is truly awesome. You wouldn't expect this from a simpl…
CALLING ALL HUMAN TRASHCANS!! (THAT'S YOU, BY THE WAY) Chicago's amazing avant-garde company Trap Door Theatre is presenting a series of eight episodes adapted from Matei ViÅŸniec's Decomp…
THE SPIN IS A SPECTACULAR SPARKLING SPUNKY EXPLOIT Satisfying, enriching, entertaining and proof that Chicago contains some of this country's greatest actors and theater, The Spin is writer/…
TRENCHANT TROLLS TRIUMPH BY TRANSMOGRIFYING TRUTH Somewhere in the bowels of Saint Petersburg, Russia, there is an agency made up of both Americans and Russians that trolls the internet, cre…
WHO'S ON FIRST, LADIES? The program states: "Rather than presenting a purely biographical story, this project uses the "honorary" office of First Lady as a lens to examine the roles that wom…
TWO DO-NOT-MISS READINGS FROM ATLANTIC THEATER Atlantic Theater Company in New York is presenting a free virtual reading series of plays that had their World Premieres at Atlantic Theater…
STILL. WAITING FOR THEATER No one has articulated the black American experience in such a way that I, as a white man, "get it," as has James Baldwin. His cool, unflappable, authoritative del…
WIESENTHAL ENTHRALLS Writer/performer Tom Dugan's solo show Wiesenthal capitalizes on the strengths of the famous Nazi hunter " his resilience, tenacity and humor. Dugan has crafted a show i…
