By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) Smartly and deftly written by Karen Zacarías, Native Gardens is a dark comedy, but one that is at its very core, extremely funny. Given the particularly volatile political climate in contemporary America, Zacarías scores by highlighting specific areas where differences in cultures and age clash most. She […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) There’s a point late in David Mamet’s script for November, a comedy written more than a decade ago, when the “i-word” is mentioned. It’s spoken by the character of President Charles Smith as he muses that he always thought he would be remembered for something. The line […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) NEW ORLEANS – It has become almost fashionable for many in the theatre world to find disfavor with the final collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music, The almost antiseptic manner in which the vile anti-Semitic Nazis are addressed in the book […]
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“) NEW ORLEANS – The NOLA Project began its tentative life as a New Orleans-based production company almost 15 years ago with The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh. This dark comedy staged days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall was part of the trilogy of plays that included […]
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 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 ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) It seems hard to believe it’s been more than a decade since Tracy Letts won his Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony Award for Best Play and a similar Drama Desk Award for August: Osage County. Almost as incredulous is that this heartfelt tale of family dysfunction took […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (‘Steppin’ Out’) Given the interest in country music driven by Ken Burns’ current PBS series, it might surprise some diehard country music fans to learn mega-talented singer and songwriter Dolly Parton had actually penned an entire Broadway score of her own music. Bowing on Broadway in 2009 at the […]
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By ALAN SMASON It’s been more than 400 years since the bulk of the Bard of Stratford-on Avon’s works were written in what is referred by today’s scholars as early modern English. Some 200 years before Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in a prose described as Middle English, peppered with French idioms. The differences between what […]