An early version of this show lit up the Live Arts Festival in ’05, and I couldn’t wait to see the latest manifestation of the collaboration between Thaddeus Phillips’ Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental and Wilhelm Bros. music. The production has grown up over the intervening years. It’s bigger, wider, and deeper, and just as amazing and magical.

August Strindberg’s CREDITORS is a revenge tragedy of classic proportions, a modern descendant of the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. His unnerving story of a love triangle in late 19th-century Sweden…

RETURN RETURN DEPARTURE considers the fleeting nature of time and the human compulsion to capture it, and there can be few more poignant examples than an ephemeral dance duet at sunset, videotaped for posterity by the performers themselves.

The annual Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe showcases dozens of local and international performing artists at venues all across the city, but you don’t have to travel very…

The historic High Pressure Fire Service Building on the corner of Race Street and Columbus Boulevard will have a new life as the permanent headquarters of the Philadelphia Live Arts…

Here are my annual picks for the best of Philadelphia theater: Best Play: August: Osage County (Arden) Honorable mention: The Island (Lantern) Best Actor, Male: Frank X, The Island (Lantern) Honorable…

CYMBELINE is one of Shakespeare’s later and lesser-known works, not often performed and hard to classify. Though inspired by legends about an ancient British king named Cunobelinus, it is not…

Some of the best entertainments are plot-heavy pulp mysteries: the film Double Indemnity, Raymond Chandler’s stories, Agatha Christie’s plays. With unemployment, serial killing, prostitution, addiction, and flawed police detectives, George F….

Review of A DYBBUCK from EgoPo Classic Theatre

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival receives hundreds of applications from American drama troupes every year. Philadelphia’s New City Stage Company is in talks to become one of those selected to travel…

Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, one of the city’s leading playhouses, is concluding its 2011/12 season with Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. The first part of Tony Kushner‘s acclaimed two-part saga exploring love, sexuality, and…

One of the best things about the annual Philly Fringe festival  is the opportunity to see several works of performing arts in one day or evening. I remember a few years ago…

In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus compares man’s existence to the figure from Greek mythology, condemned for eternity to push a rock up a mountain, only to have it…

I have a soft spot for the drawing room plays by Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maughan, and the like. With ready wit they provide amusing takedowns of bourgeois society, its conventions…

n HAMLETMACHINE and MEDEAPLAYS, now in seemless production at the space by The Renegade Company, Müller has reassembled classic texts and plot-points into a dislocating new context.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and…

Author Graham Greene wrote two types of books. His novels (The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American), onto which he staked his literary reputation, and his “entertainments” (Our Man in…

Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy, TITUS ANDRONICUS, is a bloodbath of murder, dismemberment, rape, and cannibalism, which has remained for centuries the Bard’s most maligned work. Some have questioned its authorship,…

The story of Euripides’s third place finish in the 431 B.C. Athens Dionysia festival is one to warm the hearts of unsung writers everywhere. The great Greek tragedian finished behind two now-forgotten…

“Forget all the laws of optics, which the legend does not recognize” —Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk Attempting to summarize the best modernist short stories is futile; it’s impossible to…