Singer Alberta Hunter had an extraordinary life. At age twelve, she left her Memphis home for Chicago, where she got her start at a rough club called Dago Frank’s. She moved to New York City in the 1920s and became part of the Harlem Renaissance alongside such luminaries as Duke…
We go to a play by Harold Pinter with certain expectations. We expect ambiguity, eloquent silences, language used like a scalpel or to parody literary convention and ordinary use. There won’t be a plot, and the action will be puzzling, but it will involve mis- and non-communication between characters and…
Beast on the Moon. The year is 1921. Aram Tomasian, a survivor of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, is trying to make a life for himself in Milwaukee. He has bought himself a picture bride, a fifteen-year-old orphan called Seta. Aram is young, but rigid and traditional…
Claire Boothe Luce’s The Women was recently revived at the Roundabout Theatre in New York, a production I happened to catch one evening on television. It featured Cynthia Nixon, best known as Miranda in Sex and the City, as the wronged wife Mary Haines and Kristen Johnston as her catty…
John Brown’s Body isn’t exactly a play; it doesn’t have one absorbing plot line. Instead, it’s an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s famous 1928 epic poem about the Civil War, and, like all epics, it’s a kind of episodic tapestry. There’s chanting and singing. Actors are sometimes specific characters, and…
Beast on the Moon. The year is 1921. Aram Tomasian, a survivor of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, is trying to make a life for himself in Milwaukee. He has bought himself a picture bride, a fifteen-year-old orphan called Seta. Aram is young, but rigid and traditional…
The year is 1921. Aram Tomasian, a survivor of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, is trying to make a life for himself in Milwaukee. He has bought himself a picture bride, a fifteen-year-old orphan called Seta. Aram is young, but he’s rigid and traditional in his thinking,…
I enjoyed almost every moment of Visiting Mr. Green, but the title character’s Russian-style glass teacups disarmed me completely. During my teens, my Hungarian stepfather used to bring me tea with whiskey, lemon and honey in just such a cup whenever I was in bed with a cold. And the…
Bright Ideas. Bright Ideas is about a couple who will do anything to get their toddler into the best kindergarten in town. This could be a vacuous sitcom premise, but for the most part it’s attacked with savage humor, leavened by moments of dazed empathy. Genevra and Joshua were nice…
What keeps a man alive? He lives on others. He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole if he can Forgets that they’re supposed to be his brothers That he himself was ever called a man. — Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera Suzan-Lori Parks has set Fucking A…
Meshuggah Nuns is the kind of show that seems to have no real reason for being. It’s inoffensive and even amusing in spots, but it also feels like something created for the sole purpose of filling up time on stage. And in a world full of musicals with witty scripts…
Almost Heaven. Director Randal Myler has assembled a group of terrific musicians and a winning, uniformly strong cast. Each member brings a distinct and interesting sensibility to the music. The show is intelligently written and directed, and the production values are impeccable. A large screen at the back of the…
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…
