Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart raise the stakes with their devilishly clever and cheekily smart send-up of prolific songsmiths Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, John Kander, and Fred Ebb, THE MUSICAL OF MUSICALS.
View More THE MUSICAL OF MUSICALS (Montgomery Theater): A homage and a takeoff in song
I loved to read when I was a kid
And although I’m full grown I still love what I did.
THE CAT IN THE HAT was one of my faves.
Now that book is a play* and I’m giving it raves!
The Arden’s production is silly and wild.
It’s as good for adults as it is for a child.
There’s something haunting Roelf (Peter DeLaurier) in the Lantern Theater Company’s atmospheric production of Athol Fugard’s THE TRAIN DRIVER. Disturbed by the memory of a…
View More THE TRAIN DRIVER (Lantern): A haunting look across the tracks
They’ve known each other for what—a couple of hours? Already they’re crazy in love, and they’ll steadfastly love each other against all odds. A love to die for. One of the world’s most celebrated and enduring love stories, ROMEO AND JULIET, is currently on stage at The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre.
View More ROMEO AND JULIET (Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre): A Love to Die for
It’s 1995, siblings Walker (Mark Sherlock) and Nan (Jessica Snow) meet at a run-down Manhattan loft after the death of their star-architect father. Peripatetic Walker has just returned from his latest escapist foreign jaunt and is obsessed by a new find: the journal of his taciturn father. Maybe this will will reveal the inner soul of this silentious man?
View More THREE DAYS OF RAIN (Quince Productions): 60-second review
Some of life’s biggest journeys begin with that one small voice in our heads, telling us to take an unexpected leap of faith. As a painfully shy young girl channeling bold songstresses of the past through her deceased father’s record collection, Ellie Mooney delightfully shows audiences how to find the power within, as the star of THE RISE AND FALL OF LITTLE VOICE.
View More THE RISE AND FALL OF LITTLE VOICE (Walnut): A 60-Second Review
Closing its 2013-14 season of funny and poignant contemporary two-handers with one-word titles (the excellent BLINK and TROUSERS—see Phindie reviews here and here, respectively—were the…
View More MIDSUMMER (Inis Nua): A Dream of a Rom-Com
IN THE MOOD is more than a music revue—it’s a concert, a musical, a history lesson, a show of patriotism, and a celebration of one of the most important times in American history. The 1940’s was a time of significant change. In music, the whole nation was listening to the same big bands. Swing music, romantic ballads, and dancing shaped an entire cultural movement and most importantly became a prevailing icon of hope as we faced the reality of World War II. Proudly, the show takes a segment to recognize and honor the veterans in attendance. In its 20th year of touring, IN THE MOOD is an international success.
View More IN THE MOOD (Bucks County Playhouse): 60-Second Review
Marcel Williams Foster turns social media and performance upside down, and spontaneous performance, situational intimacy, and social media are the tools you have to curate your own audience/performer experience.
Using theses and other techniques to activate the audience, theatermaker/scientist Marcel Williams Foster takes us on a self-referential tweeting goose chase. How ‘meta.’
View More #GPSBODIES (Marcel Williams Foster): Tweet the Rainbow
I once heard then-governor Ed Rendell give some cheesesteak advice: for the real deal don’t go to one of the big name line-around-the-block places, go to a food truck or your local deli and get one made-to-order. I was thinking about this truism and our prevailing infatuation with authenticity as I watched A. Zell Williams’s world premiere production of DOWN PAST PASSYUNK at InterAct Theatre.
View More DOWN PAST PASSYUNK (InterAct): Theater ‘wit’ a taste of South Philly
There are plenty of things to thrill over in Quintessence Theatre Group’s stirring, and impressively-performed, MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA. Director Alex Burns and his well-picked ensemble continue to impress.
View More MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA (Quintessence): America’s Ghosts Return to Haunt
Philadelphia Artist Collective’s tightly-corseted production of Frederich Schiller’s Mary Stuart, starring the earth-shattering Charlotte Northeast and the finely-tuned Krista Apple Hodge will leave you white-knuckle-gripping the edge of your seat. Sitting in a severe theater-in-the-round circle, the audience itself forms four oppressive walls seemingly trapping the actors on the Broad Street Ministry’s cherry wood floor. If Schiller were alive today, he would raise a thumb in approval of director Dan Hodge’s minimalist approach.
View More MARY STUART (PAC): The Prison of Power
Is a play told solely through the extant letters of its real-life characters really a play? Sarah Ruhl’s DEAR ELIZABETH, which traces the friendship between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell through their thirty years of correspondence (1947-77), seems more of a pedantic academic exercise in hero worship by a playwright who began her writing career as a poet and an admirer of Bishop’s oeuvre.
View More DEAR ELIZABETH (People’s Light & Theatre Company): Kindred Spirits in Poetry and Depression
THREE SISTERS is the story not only of its title characters—the sisters Olga (Sarah Sanford), Masha (Katharine Powell) and Irina (Mary Tuomanen)—but also of the various characters who shuffle in and out of their country home over the course of a few years. It’s a soap opera on wheels as nearly everyone falls in love, gets caught up in adultery and waxes philosophical, all while sinking deeper and deeper into the exact sorts of lives they never wanted to lead.
View More THREE SISTERS (Arden Theatre): Does the gimmick stick?
I’M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF, created and performed by Mark Nadler and directed by David Schweizer, is both a lament and a celebration of Weimar Germany and the bohemian lifestyle celebrated by the young during this time. Incredibly impoverished, pincered by a swiftly inflating currency, stabbed by the growth of hate and, underneath that hate, a creeping fascism; yet this impossible position also gave rise to an incredibly fertile undergrowth and the arts mecca which Berlin became.
View More I’M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF (Prince): Intimacy, Song, and Rage in Weimar Germany
And maybe that’s what makes Ellie Brown’s DEAR DIARY, BYE such a fascinating show. The play, directed by Seth Reichgott, presents her 1984 diary. Brown wasn’t so different from any other ten year old – she liked boys, she got sick of her parents, she was teased, and she liked more boys. There’s a pleasure in this kind of uncensored presentation, a la Nature Theater of Oklahoma.
View More DEAR DIARY, BYE (Ellie Brown): Schoolyard scraps and crushes galore
Multimedia theater designer Jorge Cousineau is moving abstract objects under the rustic dance studio in the Maas Building in Northern Liberties. Niki Cousineau is rehearsing…
View More ALL THIS HAPPENED, MORE OF LESS (Subcircle): Scenes from a dance marriage
Call it Don Juan or Don Giovanni, the Don Juan story, handed down through time, is pre-loaded with a mix of serious and comic elements and a supernatural dimension. DON JUAN COMES HOME FROM IRAQ, from theater luminaries Paula Vogel (playwright) and Banka Zizka (director), has the gravitas down and doesn’t lose sight of humor, but extra pieces lodge within this puzzle’s slippery treatment of time and reality.
View More DON JUAN COMES HOME FROM IRAQ (Wilma): A Disparate Jigsaw
We could be at a yoga studio, or a modern dance class, or even just Whole Foods (which might explain why everyone is so good looking and in such great shape) but the tableau onstage at Drexel’s Mandell Theater is the latest creation of choreographer Kun-Yang Lin. Be/longing: Light/Shadow is a world premiere based on a summer of research in Indonesia.
View More BE/LONGING I: LIGHT/SHADOW (Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers): A review of the world premiere
The angst-laden work and gloomy characters of Anton Chekhov provide funny fodder and apropos appellations for Christopher Durang’s VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE, now in production at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. The Bucks County playwright set his Tony Award-winning comedy where he lives, making for a decidedly quirky yet familiar combination of current local references and recurrent allusions to the Russian classics in a zany family reunion filled with adult sibling rivalry and childish temper tantrums.
View More VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE (Philadelphia Theatre Company): Absurdist Farce on Russian Angst