The banality of bourgeois life, the futile desperation to find meaning in mundane existence, the trivial chatter and vapid clichés used to fill the emptiness of everyday being, and the fail…
"It was just so fun," Nicole Atkins says about the recording process for Good Night Rhonda Lee, her fourth studio album. "We recorded it live, and everything was really in the present moment…
After seeing a group of onstage pirates repeatedly singing "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum," I went out to the lobby of the Hedgerow Theatre in search of refreshment. Alas, there was no rum to…
If you're a fan of Tony Braithwaite and his one-person (or sometimes two-person) shows " often performed at Act II Playhouse, where he is the Artistic Director " you know what to expect from…
Lauren Rile Smith, a Philadelphia poet and performer, founded Tangle Movement Arts in 2011. She has trained trapeze and other circus arts at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts and many o…
Diamond Julesy Gets It Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has recently become a cause célèbre. When Caesar was portrayed in a Public Theater production with a Trump-like costume and wig, there we…
As a teenager growing up in the 1950s in a small New Jersey town just across the river from Philadelphia, I was hooked on R&B music, my transistor radio tuned to WDAS-AM, 1480 on the ups…
Fresh from World War I and a devastated Europe, The Roaring Twenties indeed roared across America. In the midst of a raging economic boom fueled in no small part by the advent of film and ra…
This Santa Fe production of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus was the least Viennese of any I've ever seen. No, director Ned Canty did not set it in the American Southwest " which might have b…
Three of the most enthusiastic veterans of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival are each doing not one, but two shows this year. Jenna Kuerzi finishes out the final installment of On the Rocks' …
Instagram should probably be billed as a co-star in Ingrid Goes West. Instagram's rhythms; tap tap, CLICK, an empty heart goes lovely pinkish red; it's mannerisms, and aesthetic, #perfect ar…
Want to see some really cool plays with women at the helm of the production? We've got great news for you! Women playwrights and women-led theater companies are ready to entertain you at the…
It's no coincidence that The Devil's Music – the show that celebrates the life and song of Bessie Smith – blew into Washington's bustling H Street district at roughly the same ti…
In what is surely the most badass, take-no-prisoners performance by a musical artist on a DC stage in recent memory, Miche Braden brings her sensational star turn as Bessie Smith to H Street…
The 2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival offers a wide range of genres and topics, but few as sensitive and important as Suicide Stories: Gallery of the Untold " nine short plays by nine pla…
Steve Jobs was a revolutionary genius in communicating. He showed the world how to get "everything" anyone needed on a single gadget. Yet he was a spectacular failure in communicating with h…
Editor's note: Our Steve Cohen continues his posts on the arts scene in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a look at Santa Fe Opera's production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Lucia di Lammermo…
In the opening moments of Other Desert Cities, playwright Jon Robin Baitz introduces us to a wealthy Southern California family whose members love to play tennis " but their favorite sport i…
The Cherry Lane Theatre, in Greenwich Village, is offering a new play by a New York playwright, Thomas Klingenstein, whose earlier works have been seen at the Lark Theatre Lab, the Atlantic …
One-act plays are tricky beasts. Playwrights must balance tension with plot and story. Too little tension, and the audience is left bored, slogging through countably interminable minutes unt…
Editor's Note: Our Steve Cohen is in Santa Fe, New Mexico this week, where he's enjoying the local arts scene and seeing the work of Santa Fe Opera, a company with a close connection to Oper…
Hal Prince, producer/director extraordinaire is far too modest. His new offering at the Manhattan Theatre Club is so vastly entertaining that I hereby elevate him from PRINCE to KING OF BROA…
Opening in 1973, A Little Night Music was part of the muscular turbulence of those well-remembered primal days of rage. Rage that bred inhaled cynicism like a needed eye-opening drug into th…
If you are eager to get away from the turbulent news cycle, August humidity, annoying traffic, a mostly undone to-do list, disorder in your immediate circle, or fractures at a global or micr…
Yesterday may be far away for some; but a high-spirited comic primer of one male's vainglorious attempts to be "hip" and his bewilderment at all things relating to women awaits from the exub…