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 ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) With a subtitle – The Carole King Musical – it’s easy to conceive that Beautiful is a musical that only concerns the life of legendary songwriter Carole King and ancillary figures in her life. In fact, the story is largely about two competing songwriting couples: composer Carole…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Author Mark Haddon created a best-selling novel 20 years ago in Great Britain with “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” a book whose narrator is a 15-year-old savant boy with autism. The simple premise of the work is to transport the reader into the…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré has been trying to bring Janis Joplin to New Orleans for more than two years and, as any music lover can tell you, that’s more than 51 years after she died. Of course, it’s not the real Janis Joplin. It’s actually…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) When Bryan Batt steps on the stage of Le Petit Theatre du Carré as the star of the one-man play Dear Mr. Williams, he is literally living two lifetimes, his own and that of revered playwright and poet Tennessee Williams. Developed and workshopped since its inclusion as…
