By LOU HARRY Musicals tend not to be humble. With rare exceptions, they announce themselves whether with well-known performers, high-profile source material, energetic dance, or visual spectacle. Occasionally, though, a low-key musical finds its way to the stage, one that seems to say “pardon me” instead of “HERE I AM!!!!” Such is the case with…
By LOU HARRY Thanks to its notorious David Merrick-produced/Patti LuPone-starring died-on-the-road 1976 tryout, the Steven Schwartz/Joseph Stein musical “The Baker’s Wife” landed a reputation as being a lost cause. But like many musical theater lovers, I fell hard for its score – or, at least, the songs for the leads that were the only ones…
By SCOTTY BENNETT Hard to Say by Kyle Ayers is a stand-up comedy show about dealing with chronic – at times – nearly intractable pain. In Ayers’ case, it is caused by a nerve disorder called trigeminal neuralgia, sometimes referred to as “suicide disease.” It affects sections of the trigeminal nerve in the head and…
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 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…
By: SCOTTY BENNETT A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First is a gem of a play written, directed, and performed by Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland. This two-hander makes a connection between a couple of Boy Scouts in the early 1960s and grunts in Vietnam at the end of the…
By SCOTTY BENNETT One of the most famous opening lines of a novel is “Call me Ishmael.” It is from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a book many people are aware of but have never read. It is not the actual opening line, as two sections of prologue set the stage for what is to follow….
By SCOTTY BENNETT There are times in a person’s life when the only rational response to the pressures of daily living is to escape into a different reality. Drugs and alcohol are often the doorways to the alternate realm. Still, sometimes, the mind of the escapee creates, in whole cloth, a new place within the…
By SCOTTY BENNETT In the moments between daylight and evening, there is a time when it is neither day nor night. It is a time of transition, a liminal state between now and then, a twilight zone between what is here and nowhere. Welcome to Nowhere, a town somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains of…
By SCOTTY BENNETT One of the fascinating things about humans is how easily they mask intense feelings in a cloak of smiles and good humor. Pain, both physical and emotional, can be disguised but not completely hidden from the discerning eye. It sometimes emerges as an edgy joke or sarcastic observation. Regardless of how glimpses…
By LOU HARRY, Special to Theatrecriticism.com Yes, “Henry IV” is the complete title. Sans the “part 1” and “part 2” that traditionally complete the title of William Shakespeare’s historical take, this adaptation fuses the two plays into a three-act, approximately four-hour one-nighter. At Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, the result is a crisp,…
By LOU HARRY, Special to Theatrecriticism.com It’s made clear from the first moments of “The Antiquities” that the human race is history. Jordan Harrison’s play, a co-production of Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theatre and Goodman Theatre, opens with a pair of humanoid “inorganic” hosts introducing us to a museum that gives long lost humanity the treatment…
