By AARON KRAUSE He is entering his 50th and final season as TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s Artistic Director and has garnered many awards for his work with the Bay Area company. And to top off Robert Kelley’s five decades at its helm, one of the longest of any professional regional theater, the founding artistic director recently […]
By HERBERT W. SIMPSON Virtually all of our leading contemporary repertory theaters now include non-traditional experimental techniques in staging not only original new work but also – even especially – to perform and reconsider revivals of historic classics. Canada’s great Stratford Festival now regularly gives us Shakespeare revivals with actors playing characters of the opposite […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) When co-artistic directors Augustin Correro and Nick Shackleford founded the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company four years ago, they insisted their intent was to bring the collected works of their namesake playwright to New Orleans stages with emphasis on his more obscure and lesser-performed titles in addition to the mainstays […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“). Playwright, author and poet Tennessee Williams wrote his one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton in 1946. He was still living in New Orleans in the 600 block of St. Peter Street, only two buildings down from the present site of Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré. […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) By the time Lorraine Hansberry died in 1965 at the tender age of 34 from pancreatic cancer, she had already made history. Her award-winning play, A Raisin in the Sun, about an African-American family attempting to move out of a redlined slum and into a well-to-do white neighborhood was […]
By ANNE SIEGEL MILWAUKEE, WI. – A small but energetic theater company, Off the Wall Theatre, has produced a memorable production of one of Tennessee Williams’ later works, Small Craft Warnings. This rarely-produced work received lukewarm response when it opened Off-Broadway in 1972. At that time, Williams was 60 and feeling very aware that he […]
By AARON KRAUSE CORAL GABLES, FL. — “They say America is free? What do you know here is free?” The above line is from Paula Vogel’s popular biogaphy play with music, Indecent, now running in a mostly strong, creative production at GableStage on the grounds of the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. The work is about a […]
By AARON KRAUSE MIAMI LAKES — Parts of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts are as sweet as a sinful confection in the shop bearing the play’s title. Indeed, these moments will make you grin from ear to ear like the ambitious Franco Wicks, one of the main characters. The scenes, which for the […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) The Big Easy Boys, the inspiration of Rich Arnold, have returned to New Orleans and the Rivertown Theaters for the Performing Arts just in time for Christmas. This time they are laden with a sleigh full of holiday songs to be given out by them with their […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) No one can ever claim that Michael McKelvey is an underachiever. Following his triumph at the Jefferson Performing Arts Society’s massive production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the artistic director at Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane returns to JPAS with a fresh and lively holiday production […]