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Superior Donuts In South Florida
Tracy Letts Dramedy by Miami Lakes' Main Street Players
By: - Jan 05th, 2019Despite some apparent opening night issues, Main Street Players delivers a well-done production of Superior Donuts. Tracy Letts' play is sweet, but also has some meat to it. Superior Donuts was a finalist for the 2009 2009 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA (American Theatre Critics Association) New Play Award.
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4:48 Psychosis at the Prototype Festival
Philip Venables' Remarkable Opera Arrives in the US
By: - Jan 06th, 20194:48 Psychosis, an opera by Philip Venables, had its North American premier as part of the Prototype Festival in New York. It feels like exploding moments of Ophelia’s descent into madness. Based on a play by Sarah Kane, and often called her suicide note, musical moments of both beauty and anguish depict emotions leading to death by hanging.
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Ismael Reed's The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda
Rome Neal Directs Sold-Out Readings at the Nyorican Cafe
By: - Jan 08th, 2019Audience response to The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, a new entertaining, witty and historically incisive play was unusually enthusiastic. Ismael Reed's work was still in street clothes with scripts in hand. The actors, despite the trappings, delivered their lines with pathos and conviction, and Reed's vision shown through the bare-bones milieu.
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Wairau River in New Zealand
Top Family Estate Winery
By: - Jan 07th, 2019Phil and Chris Rose and their five siblings and extended family run and manage this rare family estate in the Marlborough region of the South Island of New Zealand. Besides bottling amazing wines, the winery is hailed as a mecca for local foods, all served in their Cellar Door restaurant. The food was so exquisite that a recipe is included in this article.
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THISTREE with Leah Coloff at Prototype
World premiere at HERE
By: - Jan 08th, 2019A mysterious figure hidden in a huge poke bonnet parades onto the rear of the Mainstage Theater at HERE. She is trailed by figures bearing jeans, an icon of the American West. These are dropped to form a trail, like Hansel and Gretel's candies, leading to the pioneer, Leah Coloff's, seat on stage. Coloff with Ellie Heyman has created a lament modeled on a traditional cowboy ballad.
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Charlie Johnson Reads All of Proust
À la recherche du temps perdu
By: - Jan 10th, 2019An older man decides he will read Marcel Proust’s iconic novel. As he reads all six volumes over the course of a year, he responds to Proust and reflects on his own life. And his audience may gain insights into their own too.That’s the sum total of an engaging solo production titled Charlie Johnson Reads All of Proust, now on stage at Chicago's Den Theatre
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The Infinite Hotel at Prototype Festival
Michal McQuilken's Rollicking Celebration of Community
By: - Jan 10th, 2019The Prototype Festival rolls on with a big production at Irondale, a Brooklyn venue which offers a large space and unusual opportunities for audience viewing. The Infinite Hotel by Michael Joseph McQuilken is having its world premiere. This is a rollicking, joyful and often touching production. It is full of surprises.
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The Infinite Hotel at Irondale
New Music/Theater Captures Audiences
By: - Jan 12th, 2019Death hangs over the exuberant music/drama The Infinite Hotel. Jib sings of the pain of loss from beginning to end. Her music is lifeful, as is the music of Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley who gave new work to this production.
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Free Shakespeare In The Park
Romeo and Juliet by Florida Shakespeare Theater
By: - Jan 14th, 2019An uneven South Florida mounting of Romeo and Juliet needs more energy. The Bard's poetry mostly fails to land in Florida Shakespeare Theatre's production. Miami-area based troupe finds the humanity of the characters in Shakespeare's tragedy of star-crossed lovers.
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Goodbye, Dolly!
Remembering Carol Channing at 97
By: - Jan 15th, 2019Broadway and cabaret star Carol Elaine Channing passed away today at the remarkable age of 97. She originated the iconic lead on the 1964 production of Jerry Herman's Hello,Dolly! It earned her a Tony award for which she was nominated three other times. She was still glamorous and forever young, but pushing 60, when I saw her in the late 1970s at Boston's jazz and cabaret club Lulu White's. That spectacular night evokes many fond memories.
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Debussy at the Metropolitan Opera
Nezet-Seguin Makes His Mark
By: - Jan 16th, 2019Claude Debussy only wrote one opera. Pélleas et Mélisande (based on a symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck) succeeds by destroying many of the conventions of the genre to which it belongs. On Tuesday night, the Met unveiled its revival of Pélleas, another acid test for its new music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and a younger generation of singers wandering through the hazy, maze-y woods of the mythical kingdom of Allemonde.
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What We’re Up Against by Therese Rebeck
Revival of 2011 Play in Chicago
By: - Jan 21st, 2019Playwright Theresa Rebeck is a master of dialogue and never hesitates to portray the bad manners of her contemporaries. Her 2011 play, What We’re Up Against, just opened as the inaugural production of Compass Theatre, a new Chicago Equity company.
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Awake at the Barrow Group
K. Lorrel Manning's Delicious Look at America Today
By: - Jan 21st, 2019In Awake, K. Lorrel Manning has created a triumphant piece which shakes sensibilities, upturns stereotypes and makes us smile at the sheer conundrum of being human. This is an entertaining , smoothly written and directed script . Nine skits with fifteen players are like leaves in the book of everyday America's s social and political issues as they inhabit our lives.
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Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon
By TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
By: - Jan 22nd, 2019Dramas such as Frost/Nixon – modern history as theater – present challenges. Those who lived through whatever subject at hand may feel they remember the facts well enough that a rehash will offer little interest. Those who sense there will be a political tilt to the play that doesn’t conform with their own may resist attending. In the case of Frost/Nixon relatively little time is dedicated to the interviews that were on television as part of the public history.
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Piper-Heidsieck Flows at Oscar Nominations
Lots Of Milestones
By: - Jan 22nd, 2019Each year, Piper-Heidsieck, the official Champagne of the Oscars, throws a party to celebrate the nominations. Attending the party is lots of fun. The highlight is always the Champagne.
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One County Film Company
South Florida Brothers' New Movie Business
By: - Jan 22nd, 2019Brothers Andrew and Tim Davis' appearance as siblings in True West inspired a film-making collaboration. Work is under way on a second feature film even while the first has experienced multiple showings. The Davis brothers have big plans for their One County Film Company.
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Looped at the Desert Rose Playhouse
Judith Chapman as Tallulah Bankhead
By: - Jan 25th, 2019It’s pure Judith Chapman totally immersed and completely in command within the skin, body movement, quirks, and tics of Tallulah Bankhead that reaches out and grabs the audience turning them into acolytes of an actor who knows how to take the stage and perform her special magic.
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American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford
Closed Since 1989 Now Up in Smoke
By: - Jan 27th, 2019In 1955 with funding from select patrons The American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut was launched. It was the third major Shakespeare festival conflated with the name Stratford, the home of the Bard. Initially there was less competition in the region for its season of summer and student oriented productions. Relying on a few with deep pockets the company failed to seek a broad base of support for its 1600 seat venue and lavish productions. When founding donors died in the 1970s decline set in with the company ceasing operations in 1989. The property was abandoned and decrepit when recently it went up in smoke.
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Janis Joplin at Harvard Stadium
In 1970 Bad Luck Came in Threes
By: - Jan 27th, 2019In 1970 I was hired to cover jazz and rock for the daily Boston Herald Traveler. To my dismay soon I was writing obituaries. It started with Al Wilson (July 4, 1943 – September 3, 1970) of the blues band Canned Heat. Then Jimi Hendrix (November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970). Not long after Janis Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970). That was the class of 1970 with an average age of 27-28. A year later we lost Jim Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971).
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Carnegie Hall Presents Song Studio
Renee Fleming Gives Us The Song
By: - Jan 27th, 2019Renee Fleming has gone for the jugular in addressing the problem of song’s survival. How do singers communicate with an audience so people want to come and hear them? Her SongStudio took place in the Resnick Education Wing of Carnegie Hall.
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Jeffrey Lo’s New Comic Farce
Spending the End of the World on OK Cupid
By: - Jan 31st, 2019In Jeffrey Lo’s new comic farce, Spending the End of the World on OK Cupid, a prophet of doom named Alfred Winters had accurately predicted “The Vanishing” in which half of humanity recently disappeared at once without a trace. Now Winters has assured those who have survived that the world will end at midnight on the day that the action of the play takes place.
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Alister Spence and Satoko Fujii Orchestra
New CD of Imagine Meeting You Here
By: - Jan 31st, 2019Imagine Meeting You Here (Alister Spence Music, 2019) is the latest release by Alister Spence, a recognized leader in Australia’s new music directive and one of his country’s most original and distinctive jazz pianists and composers of orchestral pieces.
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La Boheme at Komische Oper Berlin
Opera by Giacomo Puccini
By: - Feb 05th, 2019When it comes to culture, Berlin is always worth a trip. And a great trip it was, to experience the opening night of Barrie Kosky's interpretation of La Bohème, by Giacomo Puccini, on Sunday, January 27 at the Komische Oper (Comic Opera) in Berlin.
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Red Rex at Steep Theatre
Rightlynd Neighborhood in Ike Holter’s play
By: - Feb 08th, 2019Red Rex, beautifully directed by Jonathan Berry, poses the contentious question of who gets to tell the story. It’s a play about a Chicago storefront theater staged by one of Chicago’s foremost storefront theaters in a space that used to be a grocery store.
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Late Company by Jordan Tannahill
At New Conservatory Theatre Center
By: - Feb 09th, 2019In Jordan Tannahill’s Late Company, that time has passed. Debora and Michael’s teenage son, Joel, has committed suicide. Although the obvious path for the parents is to suffer in silence and live with the memory of the lost loved one, Debora is driven by a need to find closure. That target would be someone who can be implicated for the condition that she feels had caused Joel to take his own life.
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