I arrived at A Streetcar Named Desire at the Denver Center with high expectations. Israel Hicks has directed almost all of August Wilson’s plays for this theater, mounting layered, pitch-perfect productions and, in the process, creating one of the finest acting ensembles you’ll find anywhere. When he proposed using the…
As Mercy of a Storm opens, an elegantly dressed middle-aged man is moving about a nautical-looking and rather cluttered place that turns out to be the pool house of a country club. Snow falls outside the window. It’s New Year’s Eve 1945, and the man is apparently preparing for a…
It isn’t possible to review The Producers as if one hadn’t heard the shrieks of joy emanating from New York at the time of its 2001 Broadway opening. Critics raved about how daring and funny the show was; some proclaimed it had single-handedly revived the musical. The Producers eventually won…
Confession: I spent many years as a ballet mom. This means that when my daughter was thirteen or fourteen, dancing in the corps of some local production or other, I’d be craning my head from side to side for a glimpse of her prettily waving arms, completely ignoring the principals,…
McGuinn and Murry is a spoof of those ’40s detective movies in which the men wore fedoras and the women had gams. It’s a lighthearted, skimming take on the genre that’s neither cliche-ridden nor weighted by scholarship. The helium that keeps this smart, entertaining trifle aloft is Buntport Theater Company’s…
Speaking as someone who was terrified of the telephone when I was a child because I couldn’t understand how the voices of people I knew could get trapped in this black plastic thing, I am very grateful to Buntport Theater Company for explaining how a television works: Little fairy people…
Last Summer at Bluefish Cove starts out well enough: A timidly conventional housewife, Eva, stumbles unaware into a secluded seaside resort that has become a lesbian summer retreat. Lusty Lil meets Eva on the beach and, before realizing Eva is straight, invites her to a party. Later, the other guests…
The Nomad Theatre’s Belle and the Beast is the quintessential children’s fairy tale. It’s got all the requisite sweetness and magic; it even brings just a hint of Cinderella to the well-known story of the enchanted prince and the innocent young woman who frees him from his beastly carapace. The…
It doesn’t matter how much it’s quoted, kitschified, read at Christmas gatherings or adapted for stage and screen, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol manages to preserve its benevolent power. I like to think that’s because something in us responds to the idea of simple kindness replacing coldness in one businessman’s…
David Sedaris’s sardonic The SantaLand Diaries is a Christmas sugarplum all by itself. Well, it’s something more impudent than a sugarplum: a sourish cranberry tart, perhaps, or a bittersweet chocolate brownie laced with hash. Whichever, the Bug Theatre doesn’t serve Diaries unaccompanied. It adds to the mix the gleeful, iconoclastic…
Every time I attend one of Thaddeus Phillips’s one-man shows, more of my friends ask to accompany me. Phillips is a genuine phenomenon, and his performances delight and amaze. He’s an experimental-theater artist who works with words, puppets, objects, sound, video, toys, light and shadow to create entirely original worlds…
It’s the ultimate question, the one that preoccupies all active minds: Why death? Why the inevitable, final dissolution? And why the process — nasty, smelly, embarrassing — by which we lose ourselves, degenerating bit by bit into squalling infants, with none of the charm of infants or their ability to…
God’s Trombones is the title of a book by James Weldon Johnson, published in 1927 and consisting of seven poem-sermons. Johnson, best known for the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was hugely influenced by African-American folk tradition and by the preachers he heard in church on Sundays, and his…
Oliver! is among the best musicals ever written. But in 1960, when Lionel Bart — then a young, working-class composer — prepared for its debut, many critics were dubious. Although Charles Dickens’s novel, Oliver Twist, on which the musical is based, is full of fascinating, eccentric and entirely original characters,…
John Patrick Shanley’s Italian American Reconciliation is an amiable amble of a play that revolves around the friendship of two men in New York’s Little Italy. Aldo Scalicki (Tony Catanese) is a funny, fast-talking mama’s boy who has never managed to maintain a relationship with a woman. Huey Maximilian Bonfigliano…
I haven’t seen Eric Bogosian himself perform, and I haven’t read his work, so I really don’t know if his writing is as drop-dead funny as actor Alex Ray June’s performance makes it appear, or if June is as brilliant an actor as he seems to be when doing Bogosian’s…
Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle is a bracing black comedy, an exploration of the nature of evil. But if the topic is murky, the play is not. It’s as straightforward, clean and ruthless as a pen stroke. The action takes place in a milieu we recognize from Alan Bennett and…
Playwright Kenneth Lonergan is, among other things, a poet of confused and disaffected youth. He’s perhaps best known for writing and directing the film You Can Count on Me, which involves a young woman and her charmingly feckless brother — played, respectively, by Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. The protagonist…
The news at Country Dinner Playhouse is that Bill McHale — artistic director from the time the playhouse opened in 1970 until his premature retirement in 2000 — is back. Which means that after three years of lackluster productions, there’s a strong, vibrant show on stage. Sure, it’s that hoary…
All the sad young men, drifting through the town Drinking up the night, trying not to drown — “Ballad of All the Sad Young Men,” by Thomas J. Wolf Jr. and Frances Landesman William Inge’s Picnic so entirely typifies the ethos of the 1950s that it forces a director to…
In Blue/Orange, Christopher (Keith L. Hatten), a young black man, is awaiting his release from a London psychiatric hospital, where he’s been held for 28 days of observation. However, his psychiatrist, Bruce (Steven Cole Hughes), isn’t sure he’s ready to be discharged. He fears that Christopher is displaying all the…
We remember Oscar Wilde today primarily for his epigrammatic wit — the nineteenth-century bons mots that have lost none of their sharpness or humor over the intervening decades. This was a man whose last words were supposedly “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Wilde’s theories of aesthetics, his faith…
