Theatre
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Tennessee Williams Old and New
Year Tenn and Reading of a Guare Work in Progress
By: - Sep 29th, 2015In ten years the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival has premiered eleven works by Williams as well as ones inspired by him. There was a retrospective of 15 excerpts at Town Hall during thi year's festival. The special treat of the festival was a sneak preview of "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven," based on a Williams short story, a work in progress by John Guare.
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Yin and Yang of Tennessee Williams
From Juvenalia to Theatre of the Absurd
By: - Sep 29th, 2015Over four days we attended nine performances during the tenth annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. This planned from the juvenalia of Parade, written during his first visit in 1940, through The Remarkable Rooming House of Mme. LeMonde a violently erotic example of Grand Guignol created near the end of a long and tormented life,
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Disgraced at the Goodman Theatre
Pulitzer Prize Winning Play in Chcago
By: - Sep 29th, 2015Kimberly Senior, who has directed Disgraced since its first 2012 production in Chicago at American Theater Company, directs Goodman's new production. She directed its Lincoln Center debut in late 2012 and then its Broadway production in 2014. Since then, it has become one of the most-produced plays in the country.
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Real Women Have Curves
Pasadena Playhouse Production
By: - Sep 29th, 2015The current comedy production “Real Women Have Curves”, written by Josefina Lopez, is skillfully directed by Pasadena Playhouse associate artistic director Seema Sueko. The story set in a tiny sewing factory in East Los Angeles in 2015, celebrates Latina power and Latina women’s bodies.
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Jackson Pollock Inspired Tennessee Williams
David Kaplan Discusses The Day On Which a Man Dies
By: - Sep 26th, 2015David Kaplan directed The Day on Which a Man Dies by Tennessee Williams. It presented an over the top depiction of an ersatz deranged, stripped to his skivvies, paint spattered, drunken artist loosely based on Jackson Pollock. We have engaged in a lively exchange about the scholarly sources for the fascinating Pollock and Williams interactions. It appears that they knew each other on the beaches and in the bars of Provincetown.
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Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival
Launching the Festival with Two Plays at The Provinctown Theater
By: - Sep 25th, 2015For the first day of the Tenth Annual Provinctown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival we attended a matinee of The Day on Which a Man Dies and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Both plays were presented by the returning festival favorites Abrahamese & Meyer Productions from Cape Town, South Africa. The plays and performances were truly astonishing.
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Tempest Chicago Shakespeare
Inventive Production
By: - Sep 24th, 2015A bewitching production of Shakespeare's most exotic and evocative play. The Tempest roars at Chicago Shakeapeare.
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A Little Night Music Sparkles At Huntington
Sondheim's Vintage Show Couldn't Be Any Better
By: - Sep 22nd, 2015It is the lilting story of lovers reuniting with passions reigniting while new romances flower. Set around famous actress Desiree Armfeldt along with a cadre of unforgettable characters, this is a fabulous production on every level. The action is focused during an eventful weekend in the country. This is Maestro Stephen Sondheim’s most romantic and popular work. It features a sumptuous score infused with humor, warmth flavored by a waltz. Sondheim’s best known song, “Send in the Clowns” integrates exquisitely into the narrative. Brilliantly directed by Artistic Director Peter DuBois, this extraordinary musical already may be one of the best productions of the 2015-16 season.
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Geneva by George Bernard Shaw
Staged Reading at Chicago's Ruth Page Theater
By: - Sep 21st, 2015Shaw Chicago's new production of Geneva a 1938 play is another in its concert readings, performed by 12 costumed actors who clearly revel in the richness of Shaw's dialogue and characterizations. Director Robert Scogin takes advantage of the script's humor, political passions and ethnic stereotypes to stage a production that is funny and smart, and loaded with Shaw's diatribes against every form of political organization and chicanery.
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The Christians NY Hit by Lucas Hnath
From the Humana Festival to Playwrights Horizons
By: - Sep 21st, 2015The consensus among critics attending the 38th Humana Festival in Louisville rated The Christians by Lucas Hnath as the best new play. It has now opened to strong reviews at New York's Playwrights Horizons. This is a reposting of our original review.
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Chicago Critic Visits New York
Covers Hamilton, The Flick and Desire
By: - Sep 21st, 2015Our Chicago theatre correspondent, Nancy Bishop, recently checked in at the Edison Hotel in the heart of Times Square. She reports on several hot shows: Hamilton, The Flick and Desire.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Wrap-up of Dorset Theater Festival
By: - Sep 13th, 2015Tom Sawyer is a coming of age story that walks children into adulthood and also reminds adults what fun it was to be a child. DTF's rendition captured the magic of it all.
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Isolde by Richard Maxwell
A Legend Re-Imagined at Theatre for a New Audience
By: - Sep 10th, 2015Richard Maxwell's language is musical in the delivery of his tribe of usual suspects: Jim Fletcher, Brian Mendes, Tory Vasquez and Gary Wilmes. The actors are curiously contained and liberated at the same time, and they invite us into the flow of the story.
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Violet at San Diego Repertory Theatre
Evocative Jeanine Tesori Musical
By: - Sep 06th, 2015The ensemble cast of mainly Equity performers, make this touching 90 minute, no intermission production about the fragility of life and the quixotic-like hopes and dreams required to cope with its many difficult choices, a production not to be missed. It runs through September 13. 2015.
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Beth Henley's The Jacksonian
Chicago's Profiles Theatre Through October 11
By: - Sep 02nd, 2015Beth Henley's 2012 play, The Jacksonian, is a bit of noir, a bit of Southern Gothic decay, and set in a nondescript motel of that name on the outskirts of Jackson, Miss., in 1964.
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Flick by Annie Baker at Gloucester Stage
Losing It at the Movies
By: - Sep 01st, 2015There is a distinctly Massachusetts flavor to Amherst based, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Annie Baker's Flick at Gloucester Stage Company. In two acts and just under three hours it takes a long and slow approach to making us care about minimum wage workers at a one screen movie theater on its last legs.
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In Bed with Roy Cohn by Joan Beber
Hallucinating with Ronald Reagan and Others
By: - Aug 30th, 2015Imagining life's end as you enter illusion, resistance and acceptance is difficult. It is also difficult to portray. In this imaginative take on the end of controversial Roy Cohn's life, Christopher Daftsios creates a memorable, tortured figure. Directed by Katrin Hilbe to both find intimacy in crucial relationships and a froideur in others, this complex man intrigues to his last breath.
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New York International Fringe Presents Plath
Grease's Cultures Smashes Up Against Poet
By: - Aug 27th, 2015Sylvia Plath knew that her life after death by suicide would be larger than her life in life. The confluence of great gifts and great sensitivity made her life difficult. So too her German parents and then her husband, Ted Hughes. This musical portrait pictures poet Plath in 50's culture, a study of contrasts.
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Comedy of Errors at Old Globe
Crafty Selection Ends Summer Season
By: - Aug 27th, 2015“The Comedy of Errors” is a crafty selection, by Barry Edelstein, to close out the ‘summer season’ at The Old Globe. Under Director Ellis’ creative staging, the masterful production, has been moved up in time from an Elizabethan setting to the jazz-age, sexy, wide-open, ‘laissez les bon temps rouler’ lifestyle of 1920’s New Orleans (NOLA).
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Irish Repertory Theatre's The Weir
Distinctly Carved Characters Channel Ghosts in a Bar
By: - Aug 26th, 2015Season after season for twenty-eight years the Irish Repertory Theatre has produced plays which touch not only the soul of a nation, but the human soul. A culture in which everyone tells stories provides the bedrock for great story-telling literature. Plays like The Weir offer an artful slice of life and capture its poetry and pain. Playwright McPherson loves the monologue, and weaves four as individual stories into the stories of five residents of a small Irish town.
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NY Fringe 2015: Ideas Not Theories
Boston's Reynaliz Herrera Finds the Beat Everywhere
By: - Aug 23rd, 2015In nooks and crannies all over New York, talent is busting out in the 19th New York International Fringe Festival. Herrera is a percussionist who finds the beat wherever she is. In her entrancing concept of a kid in a warehouse music factory, buckets and bikes found lying on the floor offer opportunities for novel and instant sounds. They are even better than chocolate.
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Cirque de la Symphonie at Tanglewood
Three Rings for Pops
By: - Aug 23rd, 2015The circus came to town joining the Pops for perhaps the most fun and entertaining evening of summer at Tanglewood.
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John Douglas Thompson on Ira Aldridge and Audra MacDonald
Twenty Years in the Berkshires with Shakespeare & Company
By: - Aug 23rd, 2015With the opening of Red Velvet at Shakespeare & Company behind him John Douglas Thompson had time for a leisurely breakfast in Lenox. It was the latest in a series of interviews about his classical and contemporary roles that started with Othello in 2006. This is the first of two parts of that recent dialogue
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Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight
Comedy at Chicago's Windy City Playhouse,
By: - Aug 22nd, 2015Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight, the new sexy comedy at the Windy City Playhouse, is a comic farce with a coarse edge. Noel Coward it isn't.
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John Guare Reading Planned for P'Town Festival
More Stars Than There Are in Heaven Based on Tennessee Williams
By: - Aug 21st, 2015During the tenth annual Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown, September 24 to 27, there will be a staged reading of a work by John Guare "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven" adapted from a short story by Williams.
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