1,396 stories by "Tony Frankel"
SHREK IS A SHRUG OF A MUSICAL; BUT THIS PRODUCTION IS SURE AND SHARP Shrek The Musical is a mystifying experience. The whole thing is rather inane, versus the sophisticated silliness of Funn…
GIVE US A SECOND ACT WE DESERVE; ALL WE END UP WITH IS SCRAPS The angry young man syndrome is nothing new " think Protestant reformer Martin Luther! " but it sure found a home in the theater…
A RESONATING STORY It rarely happens. "The Broadway Chill" I call it. That moment when an already amazing show is given the perfect and unexpected staging which heightens emotion, inducing m…
THRIVING WOODS Somewhere between "Once Upon a Time" and "Happily Ever After" there is a very adult world of tests, losses, disappointments, and grief. Despite this, we assert our agency; or …
LESSER LOESSER Well, here's a jukebox musical just bursting at the seams with promise. And North Coast Rep's production of Another Roll of the Dice is definitely kinda cute, a far cry from t…
IT USED TO BE A MISS; NOW, THE HEAT IS ON IN SAIGON Infinitely stronger than the original Broadway outing, this national tour of Miss Saigon overcomes a still strangely muddled plot, some aw…
DESPEREAUX TIMES CALL FOR DESPEREAUX MEASURES More precious than profound, this new family musical is pure children's theater with multilayered storytelling and plenty of songs that aid in e…
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK As with Good Boys playing across town, Mysterious Circumstances doesn't quite give us an ending the material deserves, but hoo-boy what a ride this is. Directed by Matt Sha…
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A DAMES When Dames at Sea opened in 1966 at the Caffe Cino, a small coffee house and performance space in New York City's Greenwich Village that was at the heart of the…
FOUL AND FAIR Shakespeare's Macbeth, or The Tragedy of Macbeth, is typically dated to the years immediately following the coronation of James I as King of England in 1603. James, who w…
A PUNCH IN THE GUT Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets' seminal Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular dis…
YOU'RE GETTING TO BE A RABBIT WITH ME Whatever happened to all the imaginary friends we had as kids? Did they all end up in some limbo where they started making friends with each other, or, …
HAS TOLSTOY EVER BEEN SO HOT? In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban Lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is h…
A PERFECT FIT Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years is contextually brilliant: it is a two-character musical that starts at the end of a five-year relationship for the woman, Cathy, but a…
BILLY BOY OH BOY Meet Billy, an ex-con sharpshooter who is living his American Dream in 1979. This optimistic showman, romantic, and visionary has encouraged a fraternity of castaways " a Na…
SHE'S BA-A-A-CK AND SHE'S FA-A-A-ABULOUS Charles Busch's play Die, Mommie, Die! is equal parts Greek comic-tragedy and Hollywood kitsch " a melodramatic campy cult classic in the vein of 196…
BEST WHEN IT'S GRIM GRIMM Born in Austin and now living in New York City, artist Natalie Frank created 75 works based on the stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Using gouache and chalk paste…
NOT ONE FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece Falsettos follows Marvin, an appealing, brainy, anxious, obsessive, wealthy Jewish gay man who struggles to create a tight-knit family out of hi…
SOME, NOT ALL, IS ILLUMINATED Sadly, not everything is illuminated in British playwright Simon Block's fascinating but problematic adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling novel abo…
CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE THEATER Well, there certainly is nothing wrong with good advice. And there's plenty of that in the structurally unconventional Tiny Beautiful Things, Nia Vardalos's stag…
GRACE NOTES Now on the Kleberg Stage in Austin, TX, Anna Deavere Smith's powerful, engrossing and resonant solo play " Notes from the Field " has been updated for four actors by ZACH's Produ…
A VAULTING MATILDA Imagine Annie with psychokinetic powers, Nancy Drew as a mind-reader, or Cinderella acting as her own fairy godmother. Self-empowerment fuels this upbeat, knock-down, pell…
photos by Little Fang Up Here La Jolla Playhouse 2910 La Jolla Village Dr in La Jolla ends on September 6, 2015 for tickets, call (858) 550-1010 or visit La Jolla Playhouse
BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne's other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne's usual assortment of short scenes and…
TEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I'm not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an al…
