By ALAN SMASON This season’s New Orleans Shakespeare Festival has been quite unusual. To begin with, the first of its two major productions wasn’t even Shakespeare: it was Moliére and his final opus The Imaginary Invalid. That production was quite special with a new translation and adaptation by Ryder Thornton and superb direction by Anne-Liese…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) James Bartelle, a founding member of The NOLA Project, has written a number of original works for the troupe of young, innovative performers through the years. These include their highly imaginative The Spider Queen performed in the outdoor splendor of the New Orleans Museum of Art’s Sidney…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) There is an adage well known to pharmacists and those familiar with shampoo. The directions “repeat when necessary” come to mind for a great many things, but with the current joint production of the NOLA Project and the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) of Shakespeare’s “A…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) When Robert Louis Stevenson penned his classic tale of buccaneers and buried booty, “Treasure Island,” he could not have had a clue that 141 years later he would inspire a raucous comedy by the peerless crew of The NOLA Project, the award-winning troupe of actors who have…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) One of the most misquoted of Shakespeare’s lines is “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.” The actual line from Henry IV, Part Two is “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” but in the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival’s latest production of the Scottish play,…
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) There are many Jane Austen fans who can recite chapter and verse as to what motivated the many characters from “Pride and Prejudice” at any particular juncture. It would seem that playwrights Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon are among her diehard fans too because their recent sequel…
