By ANNE SIEGEL It has been a long wait, but the people of southeast Wisconsin finally get to be in the room where it happens. Hamilton has arrived. And what a reception it’s getting. The mostly sold-out performances in this three-week run offer a top-ranked professional tour, which is also visiting two other Wisconsin cities […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) There’s a point late in David Mamet’s script for November, a comedy written more than a decade ago, when the “i-word” is mentioned. It’s spoken by the character of President Charles Smith as he muses that he always thought he would be remembered for something. The line […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) Imagine Alice Walker’s book “The Color Purple” in which the story of Celie would be a happy tale. Walker would write of an idyllic, happy childhood in which Celie’s mother and father unconditionally love him and his brother Nettie. Later, when the siblings attend college together, they […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) NEW ORLEANS – It has become almost fashionable for many in the theatre world to find disfavor with the final collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music, The almost antiseptic manner in which the vile anti-Semitic Nazis are addressed in the book […]
By AARON KRAUSE WEST PALM BEACH — Brutal reality shatters sensitivity, fragility and illusion with the force of a monster hurricane in the professional, non-profit Palm Beach Dramaworks’ highly intense, heartfelt and heartbreaking production of A Streetcar Named Desire. To be sure, in this first-rate mounting of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Stanley Kowalski (an […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) NEW ORLEANS – The NOLA Project began its tentative life as a New Orleans-based production company almost 15 years ago with The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh. This dark comedy staged days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall was part of the trilogy of plays that included […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) When President Dwight David Eisenhower was interviewed by historian Stephen Ambrose for his eventual official biography “Eisenhower: Soldier and President,” he made a startling statement. “Andrew Higgins was the man that won the war for us,” Eisenhower claimed, “because we had no boats anywhere at the outset […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) The partial collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel under construction in New Orleans on Saturday, October 12, sent tons of debris and a crane across the street impacting the historic Saenger Theater building, where the national tour of Wicked was being housed. With street closures around the […]
By EDWARD RUBIN I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did – Harold Pinter, taken from his 2005 Nobel Prize Lecture When I first […]
By ROY BERKO Suzan-Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage and Tonya Barfield are noted as emerging African-American playwrights. Another member of that sorority is the award-winning Dominique Morisseau, the author of “The Detroit Project,” a three-play cycle which includes The Skeleton Crew, Detroit ’67 and Paradise Blue. The third in the cycle by the MacArthur Genius Award […]