By AARON KRAUSE MARGATE, Fla. — As you hear his one-liners zing from the mouth of one character to the ear of another, a sense of serenity and amusement envelops your body. Suddenly, fears of nuclear attacks and terrorist plots escape your body like tension from tight shoulders following a refreshing, deep-tissue massage. A sense of […]
FT. LAUDERDALE — In the wake of last Saturday’s white supremacist rally and destruction in Virginia, New City Players’ production of Sam Shepherd’s True West serves as a striking example of art reflecting a terrifying reality that seems surreal. One scene bears a frightening similarity to the kind of force and violence a shocked nation witnessed […]
By ALAN SMASON For the third year in a row the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine (NYTF) is presenting a major theatrical production in Yiddish at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. This time out, it is “Amerike – The Golden Land,” a piece that was first performed 35 years ago as an […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) Tennessee Williams was in many ways a man before his time and a man deeply concerned about his place in American theatre history. Following the successes of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo, Williams turned his attention to a project that dealt […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) Near the beginning of Indecent, the one-act ensemble piece by Paula Vogel, which netted director Rebecca Taichman her first Tony Award, the character of Lemml, the Stage Manager (Richard Topol), peers into the darkness enveloping the theater audience and announces “Every night we tell the same story.” […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) What truly establishes War Paint as one of the most unusual Broadway experiences is that rarely are two Tony Award winning actresses allowed to share the stage with one another and stand strongly pound-for-pound, song-by-song next to each other and sing and act their hearts out. It […]
By AARON KRAUSE POMPANO BEACH — There’s no question “Big Brother” is staring at us in Outre Theatre Company’s production of the disturbing, thought-provoking George Orwell classic 1984. It runs through July 30 at the Pompano Beach Cultural Arts Center. Several images on stage show an elderly, cross, if not outright intimidating man looking straight at us. This […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) During the summer months, New Orleans is a city beset in its defense from raging storms. But the mystical literary storm that approaches it now via the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane University – The Tempest – has much to be admired, not feared. Director and […]
By AARON KRAUSE FT. LAUDERDALE — Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is classified as a comedy, and for good reason. There’s plenty of mischief and merry making, which merge to form a frolicking night of theater. It ends (mostly) happily. But there’s a darker side to the play involving mourning, unrequited love and a resultant lovesickness. If you dig […]
By AARON KRAUSE MIAMI SHORES — A “hurricane party” hardly refers to a celebration involving University of Miami sports teams in the new, clever, satirical comedy Firemen are Rarely Necessary, set partly in Miami in a not-too-distant future. Normally when a mammoth hurricane is about to make landfall in a state, you’d expect to hear […]