BRAT Productions, Philly’s foremost purveyor of fearless rock-and-roll theater, rocks the Tin Angel with a new installment of its Barrymore Award-winning series THREE CHORD FICTION:…
View More THREE CHORD FICTION: LOVE BITES (BRAT): A Riotous Night of Rock-Theater Cabaret
The tragic news of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death by OD has, for the moment, wrested the subject of substance abuse from the shadows and thrust…
View More WATER BY THE SPOONFUL (Arden Theatre): Dissonance v. harmony
With clever repartee, SNOWGLOBE cleverly tackles deep existential questions. Under Bill McKinlay’s direction, the actors bring life and nuance to the clever Beckettian back-and-forth.
View More SNOWGLOBE (MacKnight Foundation): 60-second review
Though the classroom where GIDION’S KNOT takes place looks as cheery, bright, and typical as any, the story that unfolds in it is certainly not.…
View More GIDION’S KNOT (InterAct) is a two-person powerhouse
Thank God for Taylor Swift. After seeing Luna Theater‘s mindcrushing production of Martin McDonagh’s THE PILLOWMAN last night, I found myself a broken man. I was shellshocked.…
View More The Five Stages of THE PILLOWMAN (Luna Theater)
Yesterday morning, I received an email from the National Football League. I get these every day, more or less—updates from NFL.com on what’s happening around…
View More THE DISAPPEARING QUARTERBACK (Plays and Players) tackles football’s deadly foible
With all the claustrophobia of an Otto Dix painting, Luna Theater’s production of Martin McDonagh’s THE PILLOWMAN is a delicious 140-minute-anxiety attack. Robert DaPonte is remarkably arresting…
View More THE PILLOWMAN (Luna Theater): 60 Second Review
At People’s Light and Theatre’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s GHOSTS, the program note written by dramaturg Gina Pisasale discusses Ibsen’s life and work. In his theater,…
View More GHOSTS (People’s Light): Just give in to the melodrama
To mark the 20th anniversary of BEAUTIFUL THING, Mauckingbird Theatre Company, dedicated to gay-themed work, begins its 2014 season with a production of English playwright…
View More BEAUTIFUL THING (Mauckingbird): Boy meets boy and love conquers all
Saturday, March 25th, 1911, 4:40pm a fire broke out on the eighth floor of largest blouse making factory in New York City, the Triangle…
View More UP FROM THE ASHES (Iron Age Theatre): A bit shy of genius
EL AÑO EN QUE NACÍ (THE YEAR I WAS BORN) is the January installment in FringeArts’ year-round programming at their Race Street Pier theater, and…
View More EL AÑO EN QUE NACÍ (FringeArts): Living mosaic
John, a baby boomer, patriarch, and oil exec who has spent his life gaining, has lost quite a lot in a short period of time:…
View More Wilma Theater’s CHEROKEE impresses, in a way
AMERICAN FAIRY TALES is a kids’ show, adapted by co-artistic director Stan Heleva from L. Frank Baum’s short stories with a generous amount of modernization and localization. This is fast and messy theater making, thriving on audience involvement. The story doesn’t matter as much as the laughs, and the more we shouted along, and the more sassy little Benjamin in the front row jeered and challenged the actors, the more engaged they, and we, became.
View More AMERICAN FAIRY TALES (Walking Fish): Riotous fairy tales at Walking Fish
Overbearing relatives, forced merriness, the same damn songs playing over and over and then over again—Christmas can be a real pain in the toches. Depicting the next year of her life, Lakis plays (almost) all the characters in this 90 minute show, without a single break.
View More THE TWELVE DATES OF CHRISTMAS (Act II): My true love came to me?
In The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs, Chrisann Brennan—Steve Jobs’s first girlfriend—wrote “Steve often said that he had a…
View More NERDS (PTC): As Steve Jobs said, “All you really have in life is time”
Dylan Thomas’s poem A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES runs the risk of becoming sticky-sweet with nostalgia, and it is director Sebastienne Mundheim’s idiosyncratic vision, and the spot-on…
View More A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES (Lantern): 60-second review
Harry Slack has cut the gaping holes in Shakespeare’s logic into microscope slides, and the result is a hilarious and self-aware send-up of the rarely-discussed flaws in the work of our most beloved playwright.
View More GENDER COMEDY: A LESS STUPID TWELFTH NIGHT GAY FANTASIA (Curio): A loving parody brings infectious glee
Vaudeville has returned in all its glory with 1812’s THE BIG TIME: NEW VAUDEVILLE FOR THE HOLIDAYS. Pratfalls, double entendres, and caricatures of people past…
View More THE BIG TIME: NEW VAUDEVILLE FOR THE HOLIDAYS (1812): Juggling seasonal laughs
Lantern Theater Company’s world premiere adaptation of A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES by Charles McMahon and Sebastienne Mundheim, the inventive “interdisciplinary performance-maker” who designed the production and also directs, captures all the warmth, nostalgia, and childlike wonder of the original, employing live actors, puppets, miniature houses, plastic-bag clouds, and exhilarating snow flurries to transform Thomas’s descriptive language and idealized memories into an enchanting theatrical vision.
View More A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES (Lantern): Idyllic visions of a holiday past
TWELFTH NIGHT being the 1602 equivalent of a holiday special, there’s no shortage of booze-riddled merriment in Pig Iron’s revival from the 2011 Fringe Festival.
View More TWELFTH NIGHT, or WHAT YOU WILL (Pig Iron/FringeArts): The 1602 equivalent of a holiday special