Posts Tagged ‘play’
Contemporary Pippin Performs Well But Casts No Spell
The opening number of Pippin, Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hinson’s 1970s-era musical, is titled “Magic To Do.” Invoking magic in the opening number sets a high bar to jump, and Diversionary Theatre’s production, while solid, doesn’t rise to the level of magic. It has become fashionable to re-think Pippin, whose score by the composer…
Read MoreUnderpants Fall in Fine Production at North Coast Rep
Think Steve Martin and what comes to mind is likely to be smart, literate comedy that will make you think while you’re having a laugh. That, and banjos. Banjos do turn up in Mr. Martin’s adaptation of Carl Sternheim’s 1910 sex comedy, The Underpants, but they’re only talked about. Which is what you can say…
Read MoreIntrepid’s Midsummer Life Could Be a Dream (sha boom)
If you enjoyed MixTape, which just started its third year of performances downtown, or if you liked Mamma Mia, the ABBA sensation that’s still going strong in New York and on tour, you have a good chance of liking Intrepid Shakespeare Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some of you are undoubtedly scratching your…
Read Moreion’s Mystery Plays is for Genre Junkies
Mystery Plays were medieval pageants that were acceptable to church authorities because they were moral fables based on Biblical tales. Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa’s mystery plays are also moral fables, but his Bible is the horror genre itself, as taken from its most populist master practitioners: Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone,” Alfred Hitchcock, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King.
Read MoreAiry Anything Goes Makes an Enjoyable Evening
Airy is good for summer musicals staged outdoors, and Moonlight Stage Productions version of Anything Goes doesn’t push the envelope at all in making an enjoyable evening for its audiences.
Read MoreLamb’s Leads From Strength in See How They Run
Producing Artistic Director Robert Smyth has a knack for staging plays from the 1940s. He gets the era, how people talked then, and he’s fascinated with the details of the kind of well-made play that 1940s writers routinely produced. But, these plays today are considered quaint, and they’re seldom done. Mr. Smyth consistently provides persuasive evidence for reviving shows from this period.
He’s also good at directing farce, and See How They Run is a classic 1940s British farce. It should be a winner at Lamb’s and it is.
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