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…
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Category: Theater
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Wilma Theater’s CHEROKEE impresses, in a way
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:…
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Philadelphia Theater Calendar: January 2014
January 2014 Philadelphia Theater Calendar
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AMERICAN FAIRY TALES (Walking Fish): Riotous fairy tales at Walking Fish
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.
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THE TWELVE DATES OF CHRISTMAS (Act II): My true love came to me?
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.
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Breaking Bad, sketch comedy style
I never saw Breaking Bad, but lots of people love it. Then again, lots of people love crystal meth, and I thought it was awful. A much better bet for your cold December evening is BREAKING BAD SANTA by Philadelphia’s funniest sketch comedy troupe,
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NERDS (PTC): As Steve Jobs said, “All you really have in life is time”
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…
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A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES (Lantern): 60-second review
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…
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GENDER COMEDY: A LESS STUPID TWELFTH NIGHT GAY FANTASIA (Curio): A loving parody brings infectious glee
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.
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A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES (Lantern): Idyllic visions of a holiday past
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.
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TWELFTH NIGHT, or WHAT YOU WILL (Pig Iron/FringeArts): The 1602 equivalent of a holiday special
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.
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FROST/NIXON (New City Stage Company): A gripping game of psycho-political chess
New City Stage Company’s Philadelphia premiere of FROST/NIXON is anything but the dry historical debate you might expect. Under Aaron Cromie’s brilliant direction, playwright Peter Morgan’s story of the series of TV interviews conducted by faltering British talk-show host David Frost in 1977 with disgraced US President Richard Nixon is a painfully tense and surprisingly humorous cat-and-mouse game.
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OWNERS (InVersion): A farce in a dark world
OWNERS, a dark comedy by British playwright Caryl Churchill, is an examination of the sexual politics of power and property. It’s a fun, dark world, where everything and everyone is just an acquisition waiting to happen; apartments are traded for babies, which are traded for sex, which is used as leverage for more negotiations and scheming.
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MEET ME IN SAINT LOUIS: A LIVE RADIO PLAY (Bucks County Playhouse): 60-second review
MEET ME IN SAINT LOUIS: A LIVE RADIO PLAY is based on The Kensington Stories by Sally Benson and the MGM motion picture Meet Me in Saint Louis; the musical book written by Hugh Wheeler was expertly adapted to the unique radio play style by Joe Landry. Simply, this show is fun.
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CINDERELLA (People’s Light): The Return of an Award-Winning Panto
In celebration of its tenth anniversary season of wintertime pantos People’s Light & Theatre Company in Malvern is presenting a remount of CINDERELLA, its most acclaimed panto to date.
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SNOWBALL (Brian Sanders’ JUNK): A Wondrous Urban Fairytale for Kids of All Ages
The latest installment of SNOWBALL, the annual wintertime extravaganza by Brian Sanders’ JUNK, is a must-see world-premiere holiday delight for the whole family. Combining a post-modern urban narrative with a charming “Winter Wonderland Furrytail,” the engaging two-act show will keep you smiling, gasping, oohing and aahing at its heartwarming moral, Sanders’ stunning choreography, and his acclaimed dance troupe’s extraordinary finesse.
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NO RESERVATIONS (PNAA): 60-second review
As the holiday season begins, so does the decorating process. We all have those neighbors who take the time to remind us about the true story…
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Book Review: SHAKESPEARE’S RESTLESS WORLD: A PORTRAIT OF AN ERA IN TWENTY OBJECTS by Neil MacGregor
While Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects is not, and does not claim to be, a complete narrative history of the times or a full-blown dramaturgical analysis of the Bard’s oeuvre, it does offer a fascinating collection of twenty chapter-length essays, using the objects as a springboard to explore key issues of the day and in Shakespeare’s work.
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A MICROFESTIVAL OF STUBBORN OCCASIONS (Mascher Space Co-op): The moment doesn’t exist
This is in Kensington, on the closing night of Mascher Space Cooperative’s Microfestival of Stubborn Occasions: a set of performances described as “a space where choreography is given permission to exist in the in-betweens.” Two shows are on the docket for tonight, Foster’s #JANEGOODALLDRAMA and Christina Gesualdi’s MY NEBULOUS SOLO.
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RISK! TRUE TALES BOLDLY TOLD (First Person Arts): Risky storytelling pays off
Okay, Kevin Allison’s RISK! is the undisputed G-spot of the 12th annual First Person Arts Festival. The format is simple: five people step behind a microphone and relate their most private thoughts in the form of a story to an audience of strangers.
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