By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Sam Shepard’s powerful play about the toxic relationship between two brothers – True West – is back at the Jefferson Performing Arts’ Westwego Theater for the Performing Arts. The two-act dark comedy celebrates its 45-year anniversary this year, first introduced off-Broadway in 1980 and, two decades later, […]
By AARON KRAUSE Broadway at LPAC’s engaging and believable professional production of 9 to 5 is a fitting tribute to country music legend Dolly Parton, who recently turned 79. Indeed, the production would have probably impressed Parton, who creatively appears via recorded video to narrate the show’s beginning and end. You may recall that Parton co-starred in […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Capturing the wit and destructive lifestyle of humorist Oscar Levant is a daunting task for any actor attempting to portray the tortured genius, but in Douglas Wright’s Good Night, Oscar, there is an additional skill set required: the actor must be able to perform flawlessly at the […]
By ALAN SMASON There are a lot of people capable of taking a beloved film soundtrack and adapting it faithfully into a theatre piece for presentation on the stage. There are also a lot of people capable of directing such a work and bringing out the actors’ very best performances that are faithful to that […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) There are a few Off-Broadway shows that rise above the fray even though they are silly in concept or lack the kind of production values that won’t pass muster among Broadway producers. The current production of Little Shop of Horrors is the latest of these kinds of […]
By AARON KRAUSE Forget ghosts and goblins. Deborah Zoe Laufer’s frightening and moving drama, The Last Yiddish Speaker, centers on a real horrific scenario. Specifically, the playwright imagines that the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol was successful. As a result, a white supremacist regime came into power. Under its rule, authorities enforce ethnic, ideological […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Talk about hitting it out of the ballpark. With the Fall Classic being played out in arenas in Los Angeles and in New York, it’s easy to conflate a baseball metaphor with a description for a local hit show. But the Jefferson Performing Arts’ (JPA) latest production […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Playwright Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu has said the concept of Pass Over is similar to that of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and that it was born out of the communal mourning over the death of Trayvon Martin. But it is much more than that. It is a simultaneous […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critc (“Steppin’ Out“) Whether you loved the board game “Clue” when growing up or, perhaps, enjoyed the Paramount Pictures movie of the same title, the murder mystery genre that catapulted Agatha Christie to fame has proven to be a major draw to its success. The simple board game developed during […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) Several noted plays assign multiple roles to single actors in order to emphasize how clever and talented the actors are. Not only do they perform different roles for as many as 40 separate characters, but they are required to feed themselves their own lines. It’s not unlike […]