The best source for independent coverage of Philadelphia theater.
Found Theater Company’s latest foray into the Fringe Festival is everything the Fringe should be: experimental, inventive, boundary-breaking, and thoroughly engaging. Devised by Found’s young…
View More Experience an Original Sonic Happening at the Fringe with Found Theater Company’s ELECTRIC JUNGLE
One of the great things about the Fringe Festival is the opportunity to see independent companies perform works unlikely to be attempted by more established…
View More Treats of the 2012 Philly Fringe: THE GHOST SONATA and THE MAIDS
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…
View More CREDITORS (Philadelphia Artists’ Collective): Everything Great Theater Should Be
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…
View More Neighborhood Treats of the 2012 Philly Fringe: Fishtown, Kensington, Northern Liberties
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…
View More Philadelphia FringeArts Unveils Plans for its New Headquarters
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…
View More Best of Philadelphia Theater, 2011-12
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…
View More A Rare and Satisfying CYMBELINE at Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre
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…
View More Plenty of Pulp: THE END OF CIVILIZATION at the Walking Fish
Review of A DYBBUCK from EgoPo Classic Theatre
View More “Don’t ask me what happened. It’s best not to know!”: A DYBBUK, or Between two worlds
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…
View More A Taste of the Fringe in Early Summer: New City Stage Presents Two Sam Shepard Shorts
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…
View More Angels in America: two parts, two seasons
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…
View More A Philly theater double header this Saturday
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…
View More Sisyphus Sings in Silent Joy: Lantern Theater Company’s THE ISLAND
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…
View More 1812 Productions Weds Mamet in BOSTON MARRIAGE
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.
View More HAMLETMACHINE + MEDEAPLAYS = Renegade’s Richly Challenging Work
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…
View More Theatre Exile’s A BEHANDING IN SPOKANE Entertains
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.…
View More Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre Triumphs with TITUS ANDRONICUS
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…
View More Two Philadelphia companies take Medea in new directions
“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…
View More Stirring BLACK MONK Offered Up by Simpatico
“She began dressing, too. Only now, looking at her, Kovrin realised the danger of his position — realised the meaning of the black monk and…
View More Simpatico concludes its Philadelphia season with David Rabe’s THE BLACK MONK