By ROY BERKO Hispanic theatre is noted for its’ fictional-based literature that normally has six elements: character, plot, point of view, setting, style and theme. These are often encased in a melodramatic storyline with major family dysfunction. José Cruz González’s Under a Baseball Sky, now in production at Beck Center for the Arts, well fits […]
By ROY BERKO A juke box musical consists of pre-existing songs which are melded into a script to tell a story. The songs, in contrast to lyrics and music, which are specifically integrated into a traditional musical’s story, don’t always smoothly transition into the juke box tale. The songs can be by one specific artist or […]
By ANNE SIEGEL, Exclusive to Theatrecriticism.com MILWAUKEE – Okay, we’re not Iowa. But when the Broadway national tour of Shucked opened this week in Madison, WI – the Wisconsin state capitol – it attracted more theatergoers than the number of deer grazing in an acre of corn. When Shucked ended its respectable Broadway run in […]
By LOU HARRY Craig Lucas’ play Prelude to a Kiss reached Broadway in 1988, the same year that “Big,” “Vice Versa,” and “18 Again” were hitting movie theaters. Yes, all were body-switching stories, but Prelude was something different. Yes, it involved people’s personas suddenly inhabiting the bodies of others, but much of its focus was […]
By ROY BERKO “Neither Ruby Dee or Ossie Davis ever appeared in a Karamu House stage production but both had significant presence and impact in the organization and in the lives of Karamu artists. They often visited for speaking engagements, to instruct master classes, and to support Karamu’s mission.” The duo met at Karamu. Dee’s […]
By LOU HARRY While many companies have responded to the challenges facing post-lockdown theater by offering minimally cast shows and/or feel-good entertainments, the storied Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis has taken a very different approach. Through May 25, it’s offering not one but three – well, technically four but with two combined – of Shakespeare’s interconnected […]
By ANNE SIEGEL War is hell, they say. But the months leading up to war can also be a kind of hell, as demonstrated by the characters in From Here to Eternity, a new musical that opened recently at Skylight Music Theatre in Milwaukee. The mundane reality of military life in the Hawaiian Islands before […]
By ROY BERKO Northwestern grad, Selina Fillinger, was the first Judith Barlow Prize winner, an annual student award given to work inspired by a historic female playwright. “In 2019, her play Something Clean received the Laurents/Hatcher Award.” “Her play POTUS: or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive, premiered on […]
By LOU HARRY There are Broadway shows that seem destined for long lives after the New York production folds. I’m willing to bet, for instance, that we will be seeing productions as wide ranging as Come From Away, Monty Python’s “Spamalot” and Into the Woods for a long, long time. There are others, however, that […]
By ROY BERKO Langston Hughes, the author of Black Nativity, now on stage at the Allen Theatre, in a joint production between Karamu, the country’s oldest black producing theater and the Cleveland Play House, the nation’s first resident company, was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. One of the earliest innovators of […]