Articles and reviews of Philadelphia’s Lantern Theater Company.
Director Charles McMahon, founding artistic director of the Lantern Theater Company, asserts that all of Shakespeare’s plays, whenever or wherever they’re set, are in fact observations about contemporary England. By shifting the locales to places outside of his homeland.
View More On the Universality of Shakespeare: Roman History through a Shoji Screen in the Lantern’s THE TRAGEDY OF JULIUS CAESAR
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
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
It’s now two hundred years ago that the famous line was published: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of…
View More The Perfect Company in the Perfect City: REGENCY AND REVELRY at Lantern Theater Company
The Lantern opens its twentieth anniversary season with the Philadelphia premiere of Jane Austen’s class-conscious romantic comedy of manners, in which a young idle-rich heroine’s…
View More EMMA (Lantern): Meddlesome Matchmaking and Regency Amusements
Over the past few years, there’s been a surprising and unlikely spark of interest in Jane Austen. Austen’s novels—Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Persuasion, et al—have…
View More EMMA (Lantern): Philly falls for Austenmania
August is not the best of theater months. For most theaters, mainstream and small, the season is still a September or October to May session.…
View More Don’t Worry Philly, There Will Be Theater in August
It’s 1959. Two veterans of the Great War sit in silence. HENRI: I love the month of August GUSTAVE: I knew it couldn’t last, the…
View More HEROES (Lantern): Quieter guns of August
Like the rest of us, theater companies have to file taxes. This tax day, we look at some information from the most recent publicly available tax returns (generally 2012) for some major and independent Philadelphia companies.
View More Tax time. Is there any money in theater?
HENRY V, a wonderful Shakespeare play, is being presented by the Lantern Theater until the end of April . Charles McMahon usually does very exacting…
View More HENRY V (Lantern): Grumpy Professor Review
HENRY V completes Shakespeare’s four-part series on Plantagenet kings of England. No longer the indolent partier, Prince Hal has inherited the English throne, but is…
View More The Lantern’s noble HENRY V
The Lantern Theater Company’s production of THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE completes its presentation of Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy, following 2007’s THE LONESOME WEST and…
View More A Darker Emerald Isle: Lantern’s THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE
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
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
You may ask, “Do we need yet another production of Romeo and Juliet?” The answer is yes we do. This is the Lantern. Next question? The…
View More Romeo and Juliet (Lantern Theater Company): Do we need another R&J?
I began to attend Philadelphia theater in earnest about a decade ago, in my early mid-twenties. Consistently, my companion and I would be the youngest…
View More Old People and Theater (VIGIL at Lantern)
I’ve been a lover of the stage as long as I can remember. Mostly this love has been realized as a patron of local theaters.…
View More Theater People vs. Theater Critics…The Ultimate Debate
I’ve been a lover of the stage as long as I can remember. Mostly this love has been realized as a patron of local theaters.…
View More Why’s Everyone Such a Critic?
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…
View More Brat Productions Presents ‘Carrie’ at Underground Arts
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…
View More A Demonic Tour de Force: The Screwtape Letters Returns to the Lantern Theater Company