Tag: Thom Weaver

New Paradise Laboratories The Adults Fringe
Fringe Festival Fringe reviews Reviews Theater

THE ADULTS (New Paradise Laboratories): Fringe Review 20.2

Kathryn Osenlund September 13, 2014 No Comments

Whit MacLaughlin is going off the deep end with this one. Are you willing to jump in with him? New Paradise Laboratories’ handsomely crafted, meticulously acted, and totally weird production, is not easily accessible. Nothing much can be taken literally here, and the production doesn’t reward searching for specific meanings as it creates its own tilted world with its own skewed logic.

View More THE ADULTS (New Paradise Laboratories): Fringe Review 20.2
Deanna Gibson plays one of three witches in the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival’s MACBETH (Photo credit: Lee A. Butz)
Reviews Theater

MACBETH (Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival): A Minimalist Vision

Debra Miller July 23, 2014 No Comments

Director Patrick Mulcahy takes a modernist approach to the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival’s production of MACBETH, with a 20th-century minimalist aesthetic that compels the audience to focus on the emotions and actions of the characters and the power of the playwright’s language. It’s stark and intense, and also, at times, oddly anachronistic and comical, performed in attire that suggests a peculiar mash-up of wartime Berlin and dance club chic, military and punk.

View More MACBETH (Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival): A Minimalist Vision
Herringbone at Flashpoint Theatre Company
Reviews Theater

HERRINGBONE (Flashpoint Theatre Company): A remarkably strange solo musical, about a boy … with a problem

Kathryn Osenlund July 15, 2014 No Comments

This mighty peculiar story opens with a grown up George looking back at 1929 and singing, “Did ya ever have one of those years?” His parents have one foot in the poorhouse, as their only prosperous relative has just stinted them in his will. When eight-year-old George has the chance to take performance lessons from the surviving member of an old vaudeville act, he shows inexplicable ability beyond his years. Parental hopes for financial resurrection ride on little George singing and dancing his way to Hollywood.

View More HERRINGBONE (Flashpoint Theatre Company): A remarkably strange solo musical, about a boy … with a problem
James Ijames
Interviews Previews Theater

Freezing one’s laughter mid-stream: THE MOST SPECTACULARLY LAMENTABLE TRIAL OF MIZ MARTHA WASHINGTON by James Ijames

Henrik Eger June 26, 2014 No Comments

“You will be broken and put back together again,” as one theatregoer commented on Facebook.

Given the explosive nature of this extraordinary play, I thought it important to talk to the playwright directly.

View More Freezing one’s laughter mid-stream: THE MOST SPECTACULARLY LAMENTABLE TRIAL OF MIZ MARTHA WASHINGTON by James Ijames
Reviews Theater

ANNAPURNA (Theatre Exile): A powerful Philadelphia premiere of playwright Sharr White

Debra Miller April 25, 2014 4 Comments

Black comedy, bitterness, and intimacy intertwine in Sharr White’s ANNAPURNA. Theatre Exile’s top-notch Philadelphia premiere of the gritty two-hander captures the dark humor and devastating hurt of their relationship, as they come to terms with broken love, debilitating loneliness and regret, and imminent death.

View More ANNAPURNA (Theatre Exile): A powerful Philadelphia premiere of playwright Sharr White