By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic (WYES-TV, “Steppin’ Out”) Based on the graphic novel by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the 2015 Best Musical Tony Award winner – Fun Home – was the first Tony Award-winning production to boast an all-female creative team, featuring the sumptuous music of Jeanine Tesori and insightful lyrics and a riveting book by…
By AARON KRAUSE CORAL GABLES, Fla. — Creepy, foreboding music leaves a chill in the air at the beginning of GableStage’s practically flawless Southeastern premiere production of The Humans, about a middle-class family gathered for Thanksgiving. Such music that produces slight shivering is usually reserved for films by the likes of Stephen King or directed…
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out”) There are many reasons why John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Chicago is the longest-running American Broadway show on the Great White Way. First of all, it is a thoroughly satisfying adult comedy with a remarkable book by the late Ebb and the immortal Bob Fosse. The songs…
By ALAN SMASON The last time The NOLA Project elected to mount a musical rather than tackle a comedy or drama, the award-winning production company was just three years old. That they chose Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins on the eve of the historic 2008 election which would send Barack Obama to the White House was, no…
By AARON KRAUSE BOCA RATON — Depending on your point of view, and how it’s directed and acted, David Mamet’s scorcher of a play, Oleanna, is either: A work about political correctness on steroids and the fall of an Arthur Miller-like “Common Man,” or a tale about a vulnerable, seemingly-depressed female student battered and bruised…
By EDWARD RUBIN One might think after winning a record 21 Tony Awards for producing or directing (and sometimes both simultaneously) many of Broadway’s most popular and critically acclaimed musicals of the past 70 years, that the return of Hal Prince to The Great White Way with his latest venture, Prince of Broadway, would have…
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…
