Neal Newman

Review: ‘The Color Purple’ at the Forrest Theatre

It may take place in rural Georgia circa 1909, but because of today’s headlines about the mistreatment of women, The Color Purple is more relevant than ever. The tour of the recent Broadway hit...

Review: ‘The Miser’ at The Stagecrafters Theater

A play by Moliere in the Philadelphia area? Be still my heart! I took a quick unscientific survey in the lobby, prior to the performance, and discovered that not many visitors to The Miser, presented...

Review: ‘The New World’ at Bucks County Playhouse

A Thanksgiving musical? We can think of musicals that sometimes involve that observance, but an entire show about how the holiday evolved? Bucks County Playhouse’s The New World may be onto something...

Review: ‘By the Bog of Cats’ at The Irish Heritage Theatre

“To the Bog of Cats I one day will return In mortal form or in ghostly form And I will find you there and there with your sojourn Forever by the Bog of Cats, my darling one.” If there ever was a title...

Review: ‘Quartet’ at Bristol Riverside Theatre

Every few weeks we read in the news about the death, at 90+ years, of a beloved celebrity or artist. Someone always asks, “Whatever happened to them? I thought s/he was already dead.” What does happen...

Review: ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ at Quintessence Theatre

Family is everything according to Eugene O’Neill. The relationships you form as a child will haunt and guide all of your future life. Rebellion is a basic of the dynamic, and as much as O’Neill...

Review: ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ at Delaware Theatre Company

What’s the most impressive technical production in the area? What’s just as astounding as Disney World or any show on Broadway? It’s Delaware Theatre Company’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a world...

Review: ‘Carousel’ at The Media Theatre

Musical Heaven. Is there a better way to describe the production of Carousel at the Media Theatre? It would be hard to find a better-sung production than that given by the surpassingly youthful...

Review: ‘Funny Girl’ at Candlelight Dinner Theatre

What would you rather see: Fanny Brice singing on a tugboat in New York harbor, or a real live Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies? Funny Girl, the original 1964 Broadway musical, is a real stage...

Review: ‘Souvenir, A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins’ at Walnut Street Theatre Independence Studio on 3

How is theatre superior to film or TV? What special magic is found in live performance? This question is superbly answered in Souvenir, A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins, Stephen...

Review: ‘A House with No Walls’ at Old Academy Players in Philadelphia

Confederate statues are toppled because they ignite memories of slavery. Colleges are compelled to rename buildings because their namesakes turned out to be slaveholders. Theater companies must choose...

Review: ‘Rabbit Hole’ at Theater With a View

Warning: You don’t have much time left! Nearly one third of Theater With a View’s performances of Rabbit Hole have been rained out (including the earlier one I was supposed to attend.) There are very...

Review: ‘Scarborough Fair: A Tribute to Simon & Garfunkel’ at Bristol Riverside Theatre

Whenever a musical group has the name “brothers” or “sisters” (as in “Smothers” or “Andrews”) you can expect a tight, controlled sound with seamlessly blended harmonies. Close harmony (even if it’s...

Review: ‘Barefoot in the Park’ at The Candlelight Theatre

Six days do not a week make. These famous words of nonsense, uttered by the young wife Cory, will tell all serious theatergoers that they are in the domain of Neil Simon and his oft-performed...

Review: ‘2017 Summer One-Act Bonanza’ at Old Academy Players

Ten-minute plays are a modern phenomenon. Some critics refer to them as “theatrical fast food” or “audience sound-bites” but this type of play demands a writer who can present exciting ideas in the...

Review: ‘The Nerd’ at Bucks County Playhouse

The summer stock experience has nearly passed away. Half a century ago it was a vacation custom to visit a picturesque village and, after a day of sightseeing complemented by great food, stop by a...

Review: ‘The Roses in June’ at Seagull Productions

June 1967. What memories does that bring? Sgt. Pepper, The Rolling Stones, bell bottoms, assassinations, the conflict with ’50s conformity, trouble in the Middle East? This is the era summoned by...

Review: ‘Shakespeare in Hollywood’ at the Stagecrafters Theater

A good American farce is as rare as a diamond. If you can write a crazy comedy that will keep audiences laughing, regional and community theaters will beat a path to your door. Ken Ludwig,...

Review: ‘Morning’s at Seven’ at Old Academy Players in Philadelphia

Alone. Lonesome. Free. These three words appear often in Paul Osborn’s classic Morning’s at Seven, now on view at Old Academy Players in East Falls. This play has become a staple of regional and...

Review: ‘Making History’ at The Irish Heritage Theatre

The Confederate statues have been removed from their pedestals. Some people are disappointed. Their rosy vision of the lost genteel South has been taken away. To them, history has been rewritten...

Review: ‘Disney’s The Little Mermaid’ at Steel River Playhouse

Memorial Day Weekend usually means a trip to the shore, but Steel River Playhouse brought the ocean to Pottstown, with its glorious rendition of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. True, the show takes plays...

Review: ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs’ at Act II Playhouse

Are there any award nominators out there? Is so, get down to Act II Playhouse. This superb production of Brighton Beach Memoirs deserves a bundle of them. Much of the production’s success is, of...

Review: ‘Betrayal’ at Allens Lane Theater

Adultery, the trespass that has fascinated human beings through the ages, offers many emotional highs and lows. There is the desire that overwhelms all reason. There is the joy of stealing about,...

Review: ‘Equus’ at The Forge Theatre

Theatergoers of the 1970s will remember Peter Shaffer’s Equus as the ultimate phantasmagorical theater ride. The revolving stage, the omnipresent stage smoke, the blasting music, and the...

Review: ‘Detroit ’67’ at The Stagecrafters Theater

Two young black men stumble upon an expensively dressed but badly beaten young white woman in the ghetto. What do they do? If it’s Detroit in 1967, you certainly can’t involve yourself with the...

Review: ‘My Son the Waiter, A Jewish Tragedy’ at Bucks County Playhouse

Nearly everyone in the arts has taken another job such as waiter, receptionist, or office temp just to pay the rent. Brad Zimmerman has an unfortunately typical problem: He’s Jewish and his parents...

Review: ‘Side Show’ at The Media Theatre

Come look at the freaks Come gape at the geeks Come examine their aberrations Is this any way to begin a Broadway musical? Well, if the subject matter is any individual who has been the victim of...

Review: ‘Suddenly Last Summer’ at Old Academy Players

What did happen to Sebastian last summer? This sounds like a murder mystery, right? But if Tennessee Williams writes the mystery, one can be certain that it will be highly poetic, and involve...

Review: ‘Uncle Vanya’ at Hedgerow Theatre

A group of people are seated at a dinner table. They discuss the weather. Meanwhile, their lives are falling apart. With the revealing use of subtext like this, Anton Chekhov and others introduced...

Review: ‘Brooklyn Doo Wop Explosion’ at Bristol Riverside Theatre

Who put the bomp in the bomp be bomp bah bomp? Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong? It these lyrics fill you with happiness in the remembrance of days gone by, then run to the Bristol Riverside...

Review: ‘After Birth of a Nation’ at City Theater Company

Today’s audiences need farce. Wild men chasing beautiful women through many doors, visual running gags, women dressed as men, and vice versa, all enhanced by a desperation throttled performing style...

Review: ‘Any Given Monday’ at the Stagecrafters Theater

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise they’ll kill you. That quote, usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, aptly describes Any Given Monday, a play by Philadelphia’s...

Review.’Driving Miss Daisy’ at Bristol Riverside Theatre

Atlanta 1948: “Negro Policemen to Patrol City Streets—They are ordered not to arrest white people” This is an actual headline featured in the multimedia of Bristol Riverside’s Driving Miss Daisy. It...

Review: ‘The Carols’ at 1812 Productions

Review: ‘The Carols’ at 1812 Productions by Neal Newman on December 10, 2016 Close harmony, the singing style popularized in World War II by the Andrews Sisters, is formidably difficult to do well....

Review: ‘Black Nativity’ at New Freedom Theatre

Fifty years is a very long time for an arts group to exist in this changing world and economy, but Freedom Theatre is celebrating its golden anniversary with a reconceived production of its...

Review: ‘Clybourne Park’ at The Stagecrafters Theater

Every city has a Clybourne Park. “It starts one house at a time,” as one of the characters states. In act one (1959) it is a neighborhood that will soon have its first “colored” family moving in. Act...

Review: ‘Andrea Marcovicci: A Gershwin Valentine’ at The RRazz Room

The miraculous Andrea Marcovicci briefly returned to Philadelphia. One of the grandest divas of cabaret, Ms. Marcovicci seemed to own the fabled Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel for over 25 years. That...

Review: ‘Pericles’ at Delaware Shakespeare Festival

Thousands of years ago, people gathered in the great hall of a palace to hear a bard, like Homer, tell a magical tale of heroes undergoing a journey. Accompanied by a simple lyre, and a poem filled...

Review: ‘Marat/Sade’ at Temple University

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade is perhaps the world’s longest title for a play,...

Review: ‘Antigone’ at Gloucester County Institute of Technology

Greek Tragedy ably performed by 17 year olds? Is such a thing possible? Read on. The play is Sophocles’ Antigone, which is probably the best dramatic examination of the conflict we all face concerning...

Review: ‘The Emperor Jones’ at South Camden Theatre Company in Camden, New Jersey

Imagine the shock of the Provincetown Players of 1920 when they received the script for The Emperor Jones. The play contains a monumental role for a “negro” actor, and hundreds of roles for others...

Review: ‘Rizzo’ at The Philadelphia Theatre Company

A thunderbolt hit Philadelphia last night in the form of the play Rizzo. The quake was made memorable not only by the superb playwriting of Bruce Graham and the multi- megaton production by...

Review: ‘Electra’ at Villanova University, in Villanova, PA

The mists of ancient history paint the birth of theater as religious ritual that gradually transmuted into drama.The Ancient Greeks always considered attending a play festival as a religious act and...

Review: ‘Angel Street’ at the Stagecrafters Theater in Philadelphia.

“Gaslighting” is actually a word. My dictionary describes the verb as “a form of psychological abuse in which false information is provided to the victim with the purpose of making her doubt her own...

Review: ‘Electile Dysfunction’ at Act II Playhouse in Ambler, PA

Electile Dysfunction is a very funny show. Act II Playhouse is performing quite a community service, since the current election news ranges from ridiculous to terrifying. Laughter is certainly called...

Review: ‘Detroit’ at Theater With a View, in Pottstown, PA

Do you know your neighbors? Even their names? Years ago, (before the internet, video games, and cable TV), people routinely visited their neighbors, to share cups of sugar and companionship. Today, we...

Review: ‘On the Road Again’ at Act II Playhouse in Ambler, PA

“Why, oh, why do the wrong people travel When the right people stay at home.” From Sail Away by Noel Coward This opening lyric sets the tone for On the Road Again, a cabaret show written and performed...

Review: ‘Unforgettable Hits’ at Steel River Playhouse, in Pottstown, PA.

Atlantic City came to the Philadelphia area last night and it was a rare treat. Those who primarily know Rebecca Shoemaker and Michael McGeehan from their videos from Caesar’s Palace or their CDs or...

Review: ‘Ring of Fire” at People’s Light in Malvern, PA

The man in black has come to Malvern. It’s a long way from The Grand Ole Opry, but People’s Light has imported a cast that seems to have grown up in that world, with musical instruments in hand. Ring...

Review: ‘The Music Man’ at Candlelight Theatre, in Wilmington, DE

This one is a total slam-dunk. Kudos belong to everyone in every arena of theater with The Music Man at Delaware’s Candlelight Theatre. Under the direction of Peter John Rios, the sets, costumes...