At the Adrienne last Thursday night, the show started before the curtain went up: first there was the woman who got a verbal spanking from…
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Category: Reviews
Bleak Complexity: SPEAKING IN TONGUES at the Walnut’s Independence on 3
As SPEAKING IN TONGUES opens, two couples are about to cheat on their partners. Their dialog develops in unison; each pairing uttering the same lines.…
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One Woman, Many Voices: LET ME DOWN EASY at PTC
There are many voices in this nation’s health care debate, and Anna Deveare Smith could probably act out them all. In LET ME DOWN EASY,…
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BCKSEET Productions’ Losing the Shore
You never expect lighthearted comedy when going to a show by BCKSEET Productions. Argentine prison dramas, biting Edward Albee plays, and a Christmas show depicting Santa…
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It’s The End of the World As We Knew It: New City’s PTERODACTYLS at the Adrienne
PTERODACTYLS takes place in a sterile Main Line living room (set design Cory Palmer), a fitting setting for a work reminiscent of Victorian drawing room…
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THE CRUCIBLE (Tri-County Performing Arts Center)
Like many people, I was introduced to THE CRUCIBLE in a high school English class. The teacher dutifully told us that it was a play…
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LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE by Theatre Exile at Plays and Players
Playwright Martin McDonagh delivers a powerful political message in the most palatable of pills
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“Great Expectations” at Curio Theatre
Charles Dickens asked in his will that no memorials be erected to him and so the life-size sculpture of the author in Clarke Park in…
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Sarah Kane’s Controversial Play ‘Blasted’ Comes to Philadelphia’s Luna Theater Company
That playwright Sarah Kane looked on the world as a pretty bleak place was confirmed by her 1999 suicide (at the young age of 28). But her…
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Musical theater kicks off Mauckingbird Theatre Company’s fourth season
I’m not the target audience for Mauckingbird Theatre Company’s Philadelphia premier of “[title of show]”, now onstage UPstairs at the Adrienne Theatre. I’ve never been the…
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Brat Productions Presents ‘Carrie’ at Underground Arts
Published in 1974, Stephen King’s Carrie, the tale of a bullied high school outcast who takes bloody telekinetic revenge upon her torturers, kick started a horror-writing career that…
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A Queer Midsummer Night’s Dream
Mauckingbird Theatre Company presents a gender-bent look at Shakespeare’s famous play for a woman wert thou first created; Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell…
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A Demonic Tour de Force: The Screwtape Letters Returns to the Lantern Theater Company
C.S. Lewis‘s The Screwtape Letters is more overtly religious than his allegorical children’s books. But just as an appreciation for the Narnia tales does not require a…
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An Evening Without Woody Allen
Not everyone likes Woody Allen’s comedy, it can be a bit high-brow, idiosyncratic, or vulgar for some tastes, and like any comedy, some of his…
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Theatre Exile’s "Shining City" at Plays and Players
The past year has seen some great stagings by Irish playwright Colin McPherson in Philadelphia. The Arden’s brilliant Seafarer was followed by a stripped down…
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Shakespeare in Philadelphia: The Arden’s Romeo and Juliet Introduces a Season of the Bard
Four hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare remains the world’s most produced playwright. For evidence of his enduring popularity look no further than the region’s stages:…
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Bruce Graham Scores Again with Theatre Exile’s Any Given Monday at Plays & Players Theater
Acclaimed local playwright Bruce Graham returns toTheatre Exile with Any Given Monday (now onstage at Plays & Players Theater), a sport-themed world premiere geared to ride the success of…
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"Golden Age" – Philadelphia Theatre Company
“Great art is dangerous, that’s why there’s so little of it.” —Bellini, in Terrence McNally’s Golden Age Philly theater hacks were spoiled for choice last…
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No Deceit: Lantern Theater’s Scapin is a Treat
A classic work of comic literature, a joyous reworking by one of the best clowns in modern theater, an imaginative staging by a top-class Philadelphia…
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Conor McPherson’s The Weir: Subtlety and the Supernatural at the Curio Theatre
Irish playwright Conor McPherson has been called the “finest dramatist of his generation” (London Telegraph) with works that are “as near to perfection as a play can come”…
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