8,501 stories from Backstage
Charles Mee adds to his list of theatrical delights with this reworking of Iphigenia in Aulis, a searing, relevant portrait of an empire grown thoroughly corrupt.
Husband-and-wife improv duo Mary Theresa Archbold and Pat Shay's play off each other with flawless timing in this hilarious collection of semiautobiographical sketches about the challenges o…
The film Stranger Than Fiction echoes Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman's Reader: Both works follow a protagonist whose life seems controlled by a novel. But One Year Lease's production of Dorfman's work is considerably more complex than the Will Ferrell vehicle—perhaps too complex.
Susan Gets Some Play is a delightful bit of meta-theatre that actors in particular will enjoy.
Musical comedy construction can't get more ramshackle than Bye, Bye Big Guy, which uses a memorial service for Rumpelstiltskin as a jumping-off point to spoof all things showbiz.
Spurred by requests from many Equity members, the union has shut down 1,000 online posts of illicitly taped plays, 95 percent of which were on YouTube.
Three English performers, Gina Yashere, John Simmit, and Curtis Walker, put on a thrilling -- albeit bare-knuckled -- evening of comedy well worth seeing.
Director Daniel Sullivan provides glittering, romantic, magical moments in A Midsummer Night's Dream, moments worth savoring. There's the sense in them that no matter how fantastical, anythi…
Mac Rogers' crisp comic drama leaves you wondering about the playwright's real feelings about evil. He seems to know an awful lot about the Dark Lord.
Shakespeare's bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus, gets the Mad magazine treatment in this fitfully amusing musical from Michael Johnson, Mary Davenport, and Thomas Baumgardner.
Although writer Francesco Saviano never acknowledges the similarities outright, "Len and Ernest" clearly owes much to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." But borrower though he may be, Sav…
"Chekhov Jazz" was written to help Chekhov's heroines find their voices through song. Rebecca M.'s lyrics rarely enlighten, but the music by M., Julien Lallier, and Julien Soro evokes the ch…
Despite a few contemporary references, Steve Adams and Chan Chandler's musical is from another time - Elvis' 1960s. The cast is solid, but the book and music for this tepid piece are sweetly…
I only needed to hear Patti Wicks' opening, "I've Got the World on a String" (Ted Koehler-Harold Arlen), to know this was something way above par.
Can a political drama consist entirely of backstory? Karl Gajdusek's "Fair Game" comes close.
One can be forgiven for not knowing what to expect from "The Rat King Rock Opera" - after all, its creators don't quite know what they're going for.
Nobody seems to have told librettist and original screenwriter William Peter Blatty that his Mideast-Cold War satire never worked to begin with. So what's on stage is a brand-spanking-new ba…
In Bixby Elliot's intriguing (both in title and substance) new play, coming out and marriage issues intersect across decades.
This tale of the vigil at the bedside of a dying woman is no bundle of laughs, but it is painfully vivid. Co-conceivers and directors Jill A. Samuels and Hillary Spector have turned it into …
It's startling to realize how like the monologues of characters such as Medea, Electra, or Antigone Anne Sexton's poems are, and how deeply, hauntingly theatrical they can be.
Despite its ambition, "Elektrafire" can't even light a match.
From Blogway Baby to The Wicked Stage, theatre has been the basis for many blogs for years. With "Life/Play: An Experiment in Theatrical Autobiography," Cody Daigle unadvisedly inverts the r…
Apparently, growing up Jewish in Australia isn't much different than a stereotypical Jewish boyhood in Brooklyn, Queens, or any other such venue.
It's Mark Weiser's staid score, not Kevin Hammonds' goofy book that saps the fun from the farce-behind-the-farce known as "Kiss and Make Up."
