254 stories from That Sounds Cool
The very funny concept behind Luther, the second of three plays running as part of Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks festival, is that Walter (Gibson Frazier) and Marjorie (Kelly Mares) have adopt…
At the heart of Women's Project Theater's We Play for the Gods is the sense that there are untold riches at the fingertips of the fourteen playwrights, directors, and producers -- all w…
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, while campaigning against his former protegee William Howard Taft and the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, was shot by John Flammang Schrank. The bullet was s…
Photo/Joan MarcusFood and Fadwa opens with a crash course on Palestinian parties, a direct address from Fadwa (Lameece Issaq) to her studio audience that both fills us in on the premise…
Democracy's a lovely thing -- everybody ought to have their voice heard -- but it's dangerous, too. After all, popularity, volume, and ideas aren't always enough to string together a coheren…
Given that Kenneth Lonergan's Medieval Play is running in the Signature's largest space, I have to wonder if artistic director James Houghton was aiming for a Dante-like vibe in the spa…
Photo/Heather Phelps LiptonJapan's Takarazuka Review appears to be such a glorious contradiction of ideals that it seems almost impossible that it's never been the subject of a play before. …
Photo/Corey TatarczukPerhaps the greatest compliment I can send Company XIV's way is that this exciting, dance-fusion troupe (under the expert leadership of Austin McCormick) continues to ev…
Photo/Bella MuccariAs it turns out, Wonderful Town isn't all that wonderful: sixty years can be rough on any musical, especially one with a book as chasm-like as the one that's bee…
All the big shows on Broadway have opened, I've got my (mother's) subscription to the Signature Theater taking me on a wonderful tour of works -- old and new -- from Fugard, Eno, and Lonerga…
Photo/Scott J. FettermanHere's poetic justice for you: a successful artist invites the embittered, distant friends of her old Bohemian collective to visit her mansion, to reminisce about the…
It's the strength of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire that is reflected in the relative success of this all-black revival, not Emily Mann's directorial decisions. Well…
Four thousand miles: that's a whole lot of distance. Almost as much, perhaps, as the distance between any two people, not just across generations -- Leo (Gabriel Ebert) shows up at his grand…
"Play the game," yells the actor (Steven French), dressed in his finest cryptic-old-man robes. "We are playing the game," replies Kevin (Kevin R. Free), taking a moment on the sofa-fort of C…
Not every brain-boosting scientific experiment has to go awry (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Lawnmower Man), but where's the drama in smooth sailing? August Schulenburg's a smart playw…
So stop me if you've heard this one before: according to Jonas Nightingale (Raul Esparza), the trick behind his revival scam is essentially a two-act set up, in which you promise a miracle s…
Lonely, I'm Not; bored, I am. Paul Weitz's new play at Second Stage isn't awful, it's just awfully empty in its exclamatory presentation of Porter (Topher Grace), a once-vicious, work-obsess…
From the sound of it, Nice Work If You Can Get It is setting itself up from failure: classic Gershwin songs harshly bolted onto a Prohibition-era farce that's adapted by Joe DiPietro fr…
It's unprofessional of me, I know, but at a certain point in Clybourne Park, I stopped taking notes. I was just so enjoying Bruce Norris's overlapping dialogue -- lines that would be co…
It's not hard to see what attracted David Auburn (Proof) to a historical subject like Joseph Alsop. The twenty odd years covered by The Columnist (1957-1978) were tumultuous ones f…
One of the perks of writing about theater is being able to afford it, in that tickets are generally comped. Fortunately, last week, I was given the opportunity to give away some free tickets…
Photo/Joan MarcusIn 2009's This Beautiful City, The Civilians turned the lens of their investigative theater on a megachurch in Colorado and cut through religion to capture the essence of a …
There's a star being caught in Peter and the Starcatcher, and it ain't the unnamed Boy (Adam Chanler-Berat) who will, by play's end, become Peter Pan. Which is not to say that Chanler-B…
In Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, Dan LeFranc smoothly glided between seven years worth of tender/awkward trips between a divorced father and his maturing son; in his even more ambitious a…
The latest series of themed performances at the international 59E59 features two Scottish plays, directed by the playwrights, that deal with loss via character's reactions to historic (or ne…
