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Adrienne Mackey, 32, is the artistic director of Swim Pony Performing Arts, a performing arts company that prides itself on presenting work that is “loud, strange, and never seen before on earth.”
View More Checking in with Adrienne Mackey: Musing on the future of theater arts and artists
In the vein of last years William Shakespeare’s Star Wars by local publisher Quirk Books, The Renegade Company is holding a one-off Star Wars themed event to raise money for its upcoming productions. Costumes! Shakespeare! Lightsabers! Faux-Southern theater-rockers Jawbone Junctions!
Help us Renegade, your our only hope.
View More May the Fourth Be With You: Renegade Star Wars theater event coincides with announcement of Star Wars VII cast
In September of 1900 Anton Chekhov confessed in a letter to his actress-wife Olga Knipper: “I find it very difficult to write THREE SISTERS, much more…
View More Conversations on Chekhov: What gimmicks? The Arden’s THREE SISTERS has a lasting effect
Black comedy, bitterness, and intimacy intertwine in Sharr White’s ANNAPURNA. Theatre Exile’s top-notch Philadelphia premiere of the gritty two-hander captures the dark humor and devastating hurt of their relationship, as they come to terms with broken love, debilitating loneliness and regret, and imminent death.
View More ANNAPURNA (Theatre Exile): A powerful Philadelphia premiere of playwright Sharr White
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
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Phindie looks at tax returns for local theaters to see how much they brought in from what sources. We also look at who the best paid employee was for each “non-profit”.
View More Is there money in theater? Where does it come from? Who gets it?
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
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?
In shooting Richard Greenberg’s THREE DAYS OF RAIN, my first photographic challenge was to capture the unique structure of the play: the first act is set in 1995 and involves a brother/sister and their old friend – the son of their father’s architecture partner and oldest friend. In Act II, the three actors play the parents of their Act I characters. So it was a dual challenge to photograph basically two casts instead of one, and to try and paint a visual portrait of what is both similar and different between each character and his/her parent, and to portray the look of two very different decades.
View More John Donges Photographs THREE DAYS OF RAIN (Quince): A Double Assignment