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
A typical concert dance performance does not usually conjure up thoughts of social justice and governmental reform. At first glance, dance and politics might not seem to go together. That is not to say that the art form is entirely apolitical – different genres of art can certainly serve as a persuasive medium for declaring political statements. From a historical perspective, analysis of the arts can be used to study social change and political reform, and dance is no exception to this.
View More The National Water Dance
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
The famous five-letter-word and its off-beat aficionados Bingo is a game that has its own fascinating culture with quirky characters for devotees (the stereotype being…
View More If You’re In…. Long Island: BINGO! THE WINNING MUSICAL
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
Here are PaperClips’ Top Picks for what not to miss this First Friday, April 4th! There is a lot happening on Friday and beyond, so make sure to check out their Events Calendar for a complete listing of events throughout the month. If you are out exploring the arts in Philadelphia, use #clips215 to share, tweet, and gram along with the PaperClips team!
View More First Friday April • Top Picks from PaperClips
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
January | February | March | April | May | June July | August | September | October | November | December Arsenic and Old Lace. By Joseph Kesselring. March 11–April 27, 2014. Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut Street. walnutstreettheatre.org.…
View More Philadelphia Theater Calendar: April 2014
Since moving to Philadelphia in 2009 (from New York, where she began her career), and joining the Philadelphia theater community as a freelance director, producer,…
View More Directing the Future: An Interview with DG Founder Jill Harrison
And now, AMERICAN WISDOM, a mainstage collection of three of Josh’s one-acts, is a handshake between Philly and New York, featuring actors and directors from both sides of the ancient and abiding divide—and performing for one weekend in each city. What’s more, it was launched through an IndieGoGo campaign, representing McIlvain’s collaboration with his audiences.
View More AMERICAN WISDOM (SmokeyScout): Interview with Playwright Josh McIlvain
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
Among the first presentations in this exciting space, THE LOVE SONG OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER, shows First Friday, April 4th, at 7 and 9pm. This part theater, part musical, part film is dubbed a “live documentary.” Acclaimed filmmaker Sam Green narrates, accompanied by an original score played by Yo La Tengo. Together they create the movie experience in front of the audience in real time. Nick Stuccio, president and Producing Artistic Director of FringeArts, sat down to chat about this unique offering, as well as the developments with the new space and Fringe Festival.
View More THE LOVE SONG OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER (FringeArts): Fringe’s First First Friday
Alex Bechtel’s world-premiere production THE WEST is packing the house at the Off-Broad Street Theater in its short six-performance run. The ensemble-devised work, with Bechtel as the lead creator and director, features a cast of twelve emerging Philadelphia theater artists and an absurdist reinvention of the last days of the notorious Western gunman Billy the Kid.
View More THE WEST (Alex Bechtel): Billy the Kid Reimagined
You may have seen the Lantern Theater Company’s JULIUS CAESAR, which recast Shakespeare’s political tragedy in Feudal Japan. You may also have seen the open letter that local playwright and performer Makoto Hirano hand-delivered to The Lantern on “How to Stage Your Show Without Being Super Racist,” which he signed “Makoto Hirano, Dance-theatre artist, actual Japanese person, and actual Samurai descendent,” reposted on Phindie with Hirano’s consent.
View More The fault, dear Brutus, Act II: Interview with Makoto Hirano about “Super Racist” Julius Caesar