A PRODUCTION TO TAKE PRIDE IN All of Jane Austen's novels are built on the same premise. A woman meets and marries an eligible man after a series of usually comic difficulties. But Austen ex…
ONE FROGGY EVENING Once again, Musical Theatre Guild (MTG), a company of professional performers who present concert-staged readings, has produced a stellar offering of a rarely-seen musical…
GRIEG, INTERRUPTED The Pianist of Willesden Lane features world-class piano playing, a moving story, a performer who has mastered the art of the former but not of the latter, and a director …
THE ACTING IS DARK AND DEEP BUT THE SCRIPT GETS LOST IN THE FOREST In a Forest, Dark and Deep may not be top drawer Neil LaBute, but it does provide a showcase for two of the area's best per…
THE TRIUMPH OF IRONY When Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (R&G) premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966, the critics hated it. While a poor production…
DON’T EVEN BOTHER Broadway producers often hope lightning will strike twice as they mount shows very similar to past successes. We have recently seen the creative team of Hairspray…
LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP Americans love popular stories of miracles and redemption. And really, who doesn't? Few things are more gratifying than God taking time out of His schedule to break all …
THEATER OF THE ADVENTUROUS I hadn't realized how deeply entrenched in my unconsciousness the Peter Pan legend was; that is, until I found myself, in the last minutes of the rousing and mirac…
REVEALING JUDY HOLLIDAY If you really never cared about Judy Holliday, because you only know her from grating performances in unsophisticated 50's movies, you’re not alone. (Turns …
POINTS FOR THE RICH MIX IN BROWNIE Five women consider themselves to be friends because their daughters are in the same Girl Scouts troupe. The bond they share should have been enough to…
THE LONG MARCH E. L. Doctorow's The March was a fine Civil War novel and likely would make an excellent motion picture, but as a play it has problems. The ambitious adaptation at the Steppen…
A PRODUCTION THAT IS THE VERY MODEL The comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan can be an acquired taste for modern audiences. The plots are inane and the satire, so cutting in Victorian days, …
SIXTY MILES TO NOWHERE The setting for Dan LeFranc's Sixty Miles to Silverlake is the front seat of a car. Ky (Sean Bolger) has picked up his son Denny (Ethan Dubin) from a soccer game, as h…
BEYOND REALISM The living room and foyer of the modest house on 9th Street in the South Philadelphia of 1986, created by David Meyer, is as dank and dreary as social realism will allow. …
EXPOSITION, THE MUSICAL SPOILER ALERT in this first paragraph! There are attempts at surprising plot twists in Octavio Solis' and Adam Gwon's new musical drama Cloudlands, but this new piece…
THEATRE GHOST In uncertain times such as these, audiences crave familiarity and nostalgia. Broadway, which once turned plays into movies, is now glutted with adaptations of popular films…
DRINKS ARE QUICK Corey Womack has produced and stage-managed my two favorite Shakespeare shows of the past year, and so to me she is among the most able and important people working in the A…
A PERFECTLY COIFFED HAIRSPRAY A successful revival of Hairspray demands pinpoint casting in two roles. Tracy Turnblad, the show's central character must be short, exceedingly stocky, look li…
COME FOR THE MUSIC, STAY FOR THE CADILLAC The music is everything in Miss Saigon"not the plot, which is strangely muddled at times, and not the lyrics, which are sometimes awkward. What stic…
NEW BEGINNINGS "You are bafu!" is an insult hurled many times throughout Danai Gurira’s new play The Convert. Bafu means traitor; in this context, it is used to describe Africans who c…
A REFRESHING RAIN When reviving an oft-produced play like N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker, the hope is that the director will somehow put a new spin on the production so that the piece doesn…
YOU’RE GONNA STAND UP… Sometimes in the theater, all you need are four chairs and four actors and a director who knows how to move them around so that everything they do is as natura…
FEELING A LITTLE BLUE In 1992, a friend insisted that we see Blue Man Group: Tubes at the tiny, cramped Astor Place Theatre in New York City. At the time, people were calling it a new genera…
BLOODY MASSACRE, DULL SONG As they march through (or are flung through) the doors of an abandoned slaughterhouse, their bodies bloodied, one wonders what battle zone of what war they have co…
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NATURALISM Much has been written about Eugene O’Neill’s decision to trade first names with his own dead brother Edmund when naming the younger Tyron…