By LOU HARRY While many companies have responded to the challenges facing post-lockdown theater by offering minimally cast shows and/or feel-good entertainments, the storied Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis has taken a very different approach. Through May 25, it’s offering not one but three – well, technically four but with two combined – of Shakespeare’s interconnected […]
By ANNE SIEGEL War is hell, they say. But the months leading up to war can also be a kind of hell, as demonstrated by the characters in From Here to Eternity, a new musical that opened recently at Skylight Music Theatre in Milwaukee. The mundane reality of military life in the Hawaiian Islands before […]
By ROY BERKO Northwestern grad, Selina Fillinger, was the first Judith Barlow Prize winner, an annual student award given to work inspired by a historic female playwright. “In 2019, her play Something Clean received the Laurents/Hatcher Award.” “Her play POTUS: or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive, premiered on […]
By LOU HARRY There are Broadway shows that seem destined for long lives after the New York production folds. I’m willing to bet, for instance, that we will be seeing productions as wide ranging as Come From Away, Monty Python’s “Spamalot” and Into the Woods for a long, long time. There are others, however, that […]
By ROY BERKO Langston Hughes, the author of Black Nativity, now on stage at the Allen Theatre, in a joint production between Karamu, the country’s oldest black producing theater and the Cleveland Play House, the nation’s first resident company, was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. One of the earliest innovators of […]
By ANNE SIEGEL MILWAUKEE, WI. – Don’t be late for this class: the School of Rock is astonishing audiences at Milwaukee’s Skylight Music Theatre. Based on the successful 2003 film of the same title, this was prime material to be produced on stage. No less a composer than Andrew Lloyd Webber bought the rights to […]
By ROY BERKO Former South Euclid resident and Brush High School graduate, Dr. Alan Wieder, is on a quest “to stem the time of forgetfulness.” An oral historian, Wieder has been on the faculties of both South Africa’s University of Western Cape and Stellenbosch University and is concerned that “Few young South Africans know of […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) One of the most eagerly awaited new musicals in the country bowed recently in Milwaukee, not a typical launching place for such productions. But having the world premiere of Run Bambi Run, open at the Milwaukee Rep made perfect sense; it is, after all, based on a […]
By ROY BERKO When I saw the show in its Broadway run, I wrote in my review: “The total effect of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 is breathtaking. The traditional music, dress, stylized acting, and Josh Groban’s booming voice add to the over-arching effect. Yes, this is more than a musical, it […]
By ROY BERKO Thurgood Marshall, the subject of Thurgood, on stage at Cleveland Play House’s Allen Theatre, was the grandson of slaves. He was born in segregated Baltimore and attended all-Black schools. After high school he enrolled at Lincoln University, the oldest college for African Americans in the United States. Marshall desired to go to […]