396 stories from Theatre Criticsm
By AARON KRAUSE A small, dark statue of a woman rests among the items in Jacob Brown's realistic set design for Main Street Players' (MSP) shining professional production of Lauren Gunderson…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Jamie Wax's play Call Me Izzy is set in Mansfield, Louisiana, some three to four hours away from where he grew up in Baton Rouge and N…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") It is perhaps most appropriate that for the third jewel in Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane's studded crown is Carousel, the Rodgers and…
By SCOTTY BENNETT Storytellers are artists who use a palette of verbal and physical effects to paint, in sound and motion, the picture the wordsmith creates in words on a page. David Dean Bo…
By ALAN SMASON This season's New Orleans Shakespeare Festival has been quite unusual. To begin with, the first of its two major productions wasn't even Shakespeare: it was Moliére and his f…
By LOU HARRY There are expectations that come when a play explicitly centers on death " particularly a play with a doom-and-gloom title such as the one attached to Noah Diaz's play You Will …
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Julie Benko turned in a perfect performance as Eliza Doolittle in a concert version of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady opposite Broadw…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") It's taken ten years for the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans (TWTC) to unveil its first production of Tennessee Will…
By LOU HARRY After a few days at the Stratford Festival, I stopped in at the Shaw Festival for the first time in a dozen years. Visiting the festival and the charming town made me regret tho…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") When Company by Stephen Sondheim (and a book by Mark Furth) opened on Broadway in 1970 it was such a breath of fresh air and so unlike…
By LOU HARRY You don't need to go to an amusement park to have the feeling of riding a roller coaster. In Stratford, Ontario, you can acquire something akin to whiplash at a festival where y…
By SCOTTY BENNETT A famous line from the John Ford film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" is spoken by the newspaper reporter character, Maxwell Scott, near the end of the film, after heari…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") In Pirates! The Penzance Musical, Rupert Holmes proves he knows how to take a popular hit, re-set it in an improbable location and…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") There are times when a local production company attempts to put on a treasured musical theatre piece and it collapses under the weight…
By ROY BERKO Like the old tale, my lord: "it is not so, nor `t was not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so." The intimate Beck's Studio Theatre is a perfect venue for meeting and gre…
By: SCOTTY BENNETT A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First is a gem of a play written, directed, and performed by Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland. This two-hander makes …
By SCOTTY BENNETT One of the most famous opening lines of a novel is "Call me Ishmael." It is from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, a book many people are aware of but have never read. It is not…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Chicago "the longest running show now on Broadway and the second longest running show in history " made its way to the Saenger Theater…
˘By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Fats Waller, the very talented American singer and songwriter, lived an unfortunately short but prolific life, dying in 1943 at th…
EDWARD RUBIN, an iconoclastic theatre critic, arts critic and curator, who wrote for decades about theatre and the visual arts, died after a protracted battle with bladder cancer at Calvary …
The 2025 Tony Award winners were announced in ceremonies at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 8, hosted by Tony Award winner Cynthia Errivo. Maybe Happy Ending, a musical set in the futu…
By LOU HARRY I caught the first performance of The Prom, produced by Summer Stock Stage, a unique company that fuses the talents of established performers with early career actors. It's now …
By LOU HARRY I caught the opening night of Terry Guest's play Oak at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Center, the second of its three rolling world premiere productions. Some thoughts: " Oak con…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") A decade ago the NOLA Project mounted an unusual production of Adam Szymkowicz's Clown Bar at The Little Gem Saloon. Set in a seedy ba…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Over the course of the last several years, Crescent City Stage has established itself as the premiere equity theatre company in New Or…
