by
Brian Slattery
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May 7, 2024 11:03 am
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It was just a read-through of a scene, without a costume or stage blocking, but the switches in writer and actor Austin Dean Ashford’s tone of voice were more than enough to convey switches in character: a wistful, optimistic young teacher, and an older, weathered but hopeful mentor. Later on in the reading, a harried school principal, and four students with whom that young teacher was going to have to prove himself. Director Dexter Singleton listened intently, and took notes.
Ashford and Singleton were doing a read-through, getting ready for a run of Ashford’s Black Book, a one-man show through Collective Consciousness Theatre running at Bregamos Community Theatre, 491 Blatchey Ave., May 10 through May 25.
by
Jamil Ragland
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May 3, 2024 2:15 pm
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T. Charles Erickson Photo
Chris Keller (Ben Katz) and Joe Keller (Michael Gaston).
All My Sons Hartford Stage Hartford May 3, 2024
Warning: This review contains significant plot spoilers.
There’s so much to say about this wonderful play, but I want to focus on Joe Keller (played by Michael Gaston), the patriarch of the Keller family and the closest thing the play has to a main character.
by
Brian Slattery
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May 2, 2024 9:53 am
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Orpheus is smitten with Eurydice before they even speak. Hermes, Orpheus’s wingman, helps him work up his courage to ask her out.“Orpheus,” he warns,“don’t come on too strong.”
Orpheus extends his hand to Eurydice, offers flowers.“Come home with me,” he says, to audience laughter.“Who are you?” Eurydice responds.“The man who’s gonna marry you. I’m Orpheus,” he says.
So begins the drama in Hadestown, the celebrated musical running now at the Shubert Theatre through May 5. With music, book and lyrics by Anaïs Mitchell, it’s a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
by
Breezy Bratton
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May 1, 2024 10:17 am
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Ben Krantz Studio Photos
Romeo Channer as RED
REDREDRED by Amelio García Oakland Theater Project 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way Oakland Through May 19
REDREDRED, “the alternate telling of a story no one really knows,” was chaotic and brilliant when I saw it on April 26, its world premiere. Written by Amelio García, a transmasculine actor, playwright, and Fulbright Scholar from El Salvador, the story was inspired by Anne Carson’s novel Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse.
FUNNYGIRL Ahmanson Theatre Los Angeles April 9, 2024
The worst day of my life may be the day I turn 26, not only because I’ll be ineligible for my parents’ health insurance, but also because I’ll lose access to the Center Theatre Group’s 25 and Under program, which provides free and discounted tickets in an effort to expose young people to live theater, and of which I have been a loving beneficiary for the last two years. On April 9, I took the opportunity to see the national tour of Funny Girl, a production I’ve been eagerly anticipating since the revival opened on Broadway in 2022. A newly sprained ankle wasn’t going to stop me; I strapped on that brace and made my way to the Ahmanson Theatre, ibuprofen in hand.
Trouble In Mind Raleigh Little Theatre March 30, 2024
“Don’t think!” the director yelled, stomping over the actress’ rebuttals.
That was part of a pivotal scene in Trouble in Mind. It’s a play within a play, set in the 1950s during rehearsals for a Broadway show about lynching.
The charter of the actress, Wiletta, is an African American woman who’s been cast as the leading lady for the first time in her career by Al Manners, a white director whom she’s worked with before. Wiletta is fighting to have either the script or the plot of play changed to reflect a more thoughtful and logical ending. But every time Wiletta tries to get past a “but or an “I only thought,” Al cuts off her every word, eventually forcing her quiet. The repeated shutdowns and dismissals reveal the overarching theme of the show, racism in the arts.
by
RS Benedict
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Mar 21, 2024 11:40 am
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RS Benedict
Jabber and Hester.
In the Blood Saint Rose Theater Albany N.Y. March 15, 2024
Suzan-Lori Parks’ In the Blood, a gritty urban remix of The Scarlet Letter, presents the struggles of a single mother named Hester, and uses her story to examine the moralism and hypocrisy of American society. Capital Region’s Harbinger Theater company chose the play as a swan song for the Saint Rose Theater, whose future looks dim with Saint Rose College’s impending closure at the end of the academic year.
It’s a heartrending farewell, and not just because of the death of the college. In the Blood, though tinged with sharp humor, is a dark, unflinching drama that is not afraid to make the audience uncomfortable. It goes places, and many of those places aren’t easy to look at.
by
Jamil Ragland
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Mar 17, 2024 2:49 pm
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Bobby Ocean (right) stares down his opponent from The Mission.
Lone Survivor 5 Warehouse 635 West Hartford March 17, 2024
There are some people who know exactly what they want to be, and then they go out and do it.
I went to see one of those people on Friday night at Lone Survivor 5, a wrestling event hosted by Test of Strength, an independent pro wrestling organization. The man I went to see was none other than Bobby Ocean, my friend from middle school.
What does it mean to be “good”? Two new plays presented by Heller Theatre Company last weekend raised that question — with a host of complicated, challenging, emotionally intelligent, and deeply relatable answers. (There was no question about the goodness of the tunes played onstage before the show. “The city of Tulsa’s gonna subsidize our queer love affair,” Bronco Henryetta’s Jessa Gianna DiPesa crooned, to universal cheers from the crowd.)
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Brian Slattery
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Mar 15, 2024 2:58 pm
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Escaped Alone Yale Repertory Theatre 1120 Chapel St. Through March 30, 2024
A group of women are talking together in a garden, under the shade of a tree. In the patterns of their speech, their ability to finish one another’s sentences, it’s clear they’ve been friends for years. But their conversation is about nothing serious. It’s just a way to spend an afternoon. Suddenly there’s a piercing sound, a blinding light, and the stage is plunged in darkness, the tree suddenly a stark silhouette against a roiling background. From one of the women, we get a report of calamity, of mass death, utter mayhem. The lights blind again, and we return to the sunlit garden, the four women still just talking as though nothing has changed. But something has changed.
Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone is a by turns hilarious and harrowing, exploratory, and utterly relevant play by a modern playwriting master that, under the direction of Liz Diamond, is given a fleet, brilliant staging at the Rep’s Chapel Street theater.
by
Agustín Maes
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Mar 13, 2024 3:58 pm
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Ben Krantz Studio
Christine Bruno as Ani and Daniel Duque-Estrada as Eddie.
The Cost of Living Oakland Theater Project at FLAX Art & Design 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way Oakland Through March 24, 2024
People are people, despite how they might (try to) appear otherwise. And life happens. And people do what humans do when life happens: we put up fronts. But despite the masks we don to cope with the shit that makes us front in the first place — our frustrations, angers, fears — we need each other. And we know what’s real when it’s real: genuineness cracking through by small, intimate demonstrations of care that dissolve all façades.
Oakland Theater Project’s production of Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Cost of Living, directed by Emilie Whelan, is for real. What’s shown is a whole picture of persons whose lives are fashioned by every other’s in a beautiful dance of guarded wariness and hope.
by
Jack Skelley
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Mar 11, 2024 2:02 pm
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GLASSHOUSE VOLTACOLLECTIVE and CENTRALSERVERWORKS G‑SON Studios Los Angeles Closed
You enter not a room but a realm. Dreamlike, the space is bathed in deep, indigo velvet and moody music. In three corners are three discrete sculptural set pieces with dancers: five or so figures encased in a crate of shredded black gauze, two figures embracing tightly — as one — in a water-filled tub, and a queen-sized bed seemingly made of mud where two more bodies entwine. As an audience member, you are encouraged to interact with these installations.
You take a seat and things explode: a narrator appears and delivers a searing, descriptive text about abusive parenting; a hyperkinetic score picks up steam; and the bodies emerge to crash through this psychic space.
You’re in Glass House, a shimmering, shattering, immersive, layered, intermedia performance from Volta Collective and Central Server Works that peers into “the psychological construction of home.”
by
Emily Ann Zisko
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Mar 6, 2024 2:40 pm
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Fear of Kathy Acker Illusion Magic Lounge Santa Monica Feb. 29, 2024
A flash of red taillights: The satin stage curtain of the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica parts, and a member of the Greek chorus in fishnets and silver booty shorts instructs the audience to keep their hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. Play ball!
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Jamil Ragland
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Mar 1, 2024 3:41 pm
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The Hot Wing King Hartford Stage Hartford Through March 24, 2024
We got an extra day of Black History Month this year, so I celebrated by going to see the premiere of The Hot Wing King, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Katori Hall.
by
Alicia Chesser
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Feb 29, 2024 12:55 pm
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ALICIA CHESSER PHOTO
Obum Ukabam and Ibrahim Buyckes after "Topdog/Underdog"
Theatre North “Topdog/Underdog“ Tulsa Performing Arts Center Feb. 25, 2024
There’s no winning in the game explored in Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which Theatre North recently presented in an excellent production directed by Robert S. Walters. That forward slash in the title tells it all: every reality has two faces, and guessing which one’s going to end up on top is as thrilling and futile as trying to follow the hands of three-card monte that scatter throughout this play.
