By EDWARD RUBIN Will Arbery’s latest play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, having been extended two times by popular demand, is now running Off-Broadway through Sunday, November 17, 2019 at Playwrights Horizons. With more religious, personal, and political exposition (read talk) than many a mind can absorb at one sitting, Heroes of the Fourth Turning […]
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”) 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 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“) 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 […]
By AARON KRAUSE WEST PALM BEACH — This isn’t how your grandparents experienced Man of La Mancha. No, the nonprofit, professional MNM Theatre Company’s intense, fourth-wall breaking, moving and at-times-grim production feels deeper and more modern. For instance, when we walk into the theater, there is no curtain. Rather, the set and the performers are […]
By EDWARD RUBIN Sea Wall/A Life, two extraordinarily powerful one-act plays, presented in monologue form, are holding court at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Fueled by strong reviews, and the star power of film and stage actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge, it is one of the most deeply moving productions currently gracing the stage […]