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 […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was first mounted in the fall of 1879, so there is little debate that the work could use a bit of timely updating. The original language is also outdated in that Dano-Norwegian is hardly ever employed and translating it into modern English […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) It’s been said that the third time’s the charm. Previously, two earlier iterations of Hairspray have graced local theaters. Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré produced the regional premiere in September 2010 and Jefferson Performing Arts followed with their production two years later in 2012. Both of […]
By ALAN SMASON For the past several weeks, I’ve been promoting this weekend as a way for the local theatre community to give back to Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré, the historic theater founded in 1916 and nestled in the heart of the French Quarter. Friday night, September 6, was Le Petit’s annual fundraiser, […]
By AARON KRAUSE While summer camp is over for kids, a different kind of camp is in session for adults at Island City Stage (ICS). There, the side-splitting camp comic classic Die, Mommie, Die!, which is not for children, is keeping the laughometer as high as current temperatures in hot and humid South Florida. In its intimate black […]