By ANNE SIEGEL NEW YORK – It’s just an off-Broadway memory now, but the recently exited India Pale Ale gave audiences some serious issues to consider. India Pale Ale was written by 32-year-old Punjabi-American playwright Jaclyn Backhaus. The play won this year’s Horton Foote Prize, and Manhattan Theater Club launched the play on October 23….
By ALAN SMASON For those of you living under a rock, King Kong opened on Broadway last Thursday (Nov. 8) and, as one would expect, most every critic panned the newest addition to the Great White Way as being shallow or lacking in theatrical achievement in song and dance. In many ways they are right….
By EDWARD RUBIN If you want a bit of theatrical heaven, along with a smidgen of hell, a mini primer of late 60s gay history – with the obligatory nod to Stonewall included – and a lot of love, all both literally and figuratively, get thee to Midnight at the Never Get, the York Theater…
By HERBERT SIMPSON Despite already having knocked people out in splendidly acted versions, this important and enormously appealing play seems to be moving to “National Treasure” status in ever-more-polished versions. Geva’s has nowhere to go after its just-opened, new production, which closes November 16 and will probably sell out. But this one-actor account of the…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) If anyone questioned whether Shelbie Mac is the greatest young talent to come down the pike since the late Cynthia Owen, all doubts have been erased with her starring role in Peter Pan, currently playing the boards at the Jefferson Performing Arts Center on Airline Drive. Mac, who…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) When we last viewed Torvald and Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen’s immortal play A Doll’s House, Nora had made an irreconcilable decision. Simply put, she wanted more from life than being a wife and mother. Her purpose was to become “a human being” and not be defined by…
By EDWARD RUBIN The Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of Wild Abandon, Lyeena Rideout’s intimate one-woman autobiographical extravaganza – housed in the Rep’s second theatre, a cozy 50-seater – is one of a handful of Off-Broadway plays that everybody is talking about. Critics are raving, and audiences are returning again and again with friends in tow,…
By EDWARD RUBIN “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.” – Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Thinking…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Louis Armstrong has been one of the most thoroughly researched, yet still largely unknown figures. Part of the problem is that the lens of history has been deliberately clouded and that much of his life’s story was glamorized and rewritten by no less a raconteur than Armstrong himself….
By ROY BERKO It was apparent on reviewer’s night of Hello, Dolly!, which is starting its national tour in Cleveland, that many of the audience, which was awash in red clothing, had heard of the “wear David Merrick red” to productions of this script. David Merrick red? Merrick was often referred to as the “Abominable Showman.” One…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) October 6 will be the 20th anniversary of the kidnapping, torture and beating of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Shepard, a student at the nearby University of Wyoming, was targeted as a victim for aggression and violence because he was outwardly gay. Discovered tied to a remote…
By ROY BERKO Susan Hill, author of the book “The Woman in Black,” the source of the play of the same name now being staged at the Cleveland Play House (CPH), relates: “The Suffolk coast. Winter. The early Seventies. Behind the path giving onto the shingle beach and the North Sea, are marshes, mysterious places…
