By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) It is perhaps most appropriate that for the third jewel in Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane’s studded crown is Carousel, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. The old chestnut is always welcomed when it allows for all stops to be pulled out […]
By SCOTTY BENNETT Storytellers are artists who use a palette of verbal and physical effects to paint, in sound and motion, the picture the wordsmith creates in words on a page. David Dean Bottrell is both a craftsman and an artist. His show, Teenage Wasteland: Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, True Stories of Heartbreak, Hard-ons & Hair, […]
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 LOU HARRY There are expectations that come when a play explicitly centers on death – particularly a play with a doom-and-gloom title such as the one attached to Noah Diaz’s play You Will Get Sick, that played until recently in an extended run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The surprisingly funny play circumnavigates most […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Julie Benko turned in a perfect performance as Eliza Doolittle in a concert version of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady opposite Broadway veteran Raúl Esparza as Professor Henry Higgins in Aspen this past week. Benko’s credentials as a bona fide Broadway star were confirmed in this […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) It’s taken ten years for the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans (TWTC) to unveil its first production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Along with A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, it is considered the third jewel in the crown […]
By LOU HARRY After a few days at the Stratford Festival, I stopped in at the Shaw Festival for the first time in a dozen years. Visiting the festival and the charming town made me regret those years I missed (although I certainly won’t be returning to the bed and breakfast where I stayed. Ask […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) When Company by Stephen Sondheim (and a book by Mark Furth) opened on Broadway in 1970 it was such a breath of fresh air and so unlike anything else he or anyone else had done previously that it took a notably short period of time for it […]
By LOU HARRY You don’t need to go to an amusement park to have the feeling of riding a roller coaster. In Stratford, Ontario, you can acquire something akin to whiplash at a festival where you can see a brutal, biker-based Macbeth, an austere, and a spirit-lifting Annie in the same weekend with a garden […]
![Leighton Samuels - Mari Blake[5]](https://www.theatrecriticism.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Leighton-Samuels-Mari-Blake5-1024x575-300x225.jpeg)
By SCOTTY BENNETT A famous line from the John Ford film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is spoken by the newspaper reporter character, Maxwell Scott, near the end of the film, after hearing the true story about the death of Liberty Valance. When asked if he will print the facts, Scott replies: “When the […]