By AARON KRAUSE WILTON MANORS, Fla. — In a way, The Radicalization of Rolfe is to The Sound of Music as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet. Consider: In Rosencrantz and Radicalization, the playwrights imagine what minor characters might be talking and thinking about when we don’t see or hear them in the […]
By AARON KRAUSE FT. LAUDERDALE — The lyrics resonate chillingly in the wake of the recent mass school shooting in South Florida, leaving 17 dead – and another shooting about a month later in Maryland, leaving two dead: Change don’t come easy You gotta believe me It ain’t gonna happen overnight. Change don’t come quickly, […]
By AARON KRAUSE BOCA RATON — On the Playbill’s cover, gold, upper case letters spell out the title of the enchanting musical playing at The Wick Theatre and Costume Museum through April 8. If the gold coloring and capitalization are coincidence, they’re appropriately symbolic. That’s because we need a “Brigadoon” these days. It’s difficult not […]
By AARON KRAUSE MIAMI — People attend live theater because they “feel other people’s emotions, see the world like they do,” opines a character in Dancing Lessons. The character, Senga Quinn, could easily be talking about the play in which she appears. The taut, yet meaty piece by Mark St. Germain is running through March […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) The Jefferson Performing Arts Society brought out an oldie, but a goodie this past week when it opened the Roger Bean standby The Marvelous Wonderettes, a four-woman mashup of late 1950s and early 1960s pop classics. Directed and choreographed by Jonathan Drury, this cast has some amazing […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) While ruminating about the current production of A Streetcar Named Desire playing at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré, there was the thought of a scene in the hilarious fake rock biopic “This Is Spinal Tap” that sprang to mind. In describing an amplifier’s output, Christopher Guest’s […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) When Robert Harling first created the six Chinquapin, Louisiana leading ladies who hang at Truvy’s salon, America was still living through the Reagan years. Steel Magnolias was Harling’s reference to the nature of the ladies, who, season after season, stand firm and tall like trees, dealing with the […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) Three years ago the National World War II Museum’s entertainment staff decided to move away from the standard fare they offered, which was mostlyWorld War II-centric material. While the mission of the museum is to recall the triumph of the “Greatest Generation,” it makes sense to market […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out”) Perhaps the darkest of the Disney animated films, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” was the last of the film series known as the Disney Renaissance that began with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” in 1998. Like earlier projects by Menken and his celebrated lyricist partner Howard Ashman (“The […]
By ALAN SMASON, Theatre Critic, WYES-TV (“Steppin’ Out“) There is a point midway during the current production of Million Dollar Quartet at Rivertown Theaters for the Performing Arts when the major singing members of the cast join their voices together in the gospel favorite “Down By the Riverside” with only a simple guitar accompaniment. The melding […]