Reviews

Review: ‘Disgraced’ at NextStop Theatre Company

What a combustible evening at NextStop’s production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar. Under Thembi Duncan’s adroit direction and with fascinating casting, this in-your-face drama...

Review: ‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’ at 1st Stage

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, now in production at 1st Stage, opens while the audience is still finding their seats. On a raised platform, in the round, Angel Cruz (Luis Alberto...

Review: ‘Aesop’s Fables’ at Quintessence Theatre Group

All of the characters in Lee Cortopassi’s colorful cartoon-like adaptation of Aesop’s Fables sparkle, and speak, just like the original ones drawn up way back circa 600 B.C. But they also snap,...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘Labor of Love’ by The WaitStaff at L’Étage Cabaret

Philadelphia sketch-comedy icon, and longest-running annual act in the history of the Fringe, The WaitStaff marks its seventeenth year of participation with an all-new Labor of Love. Directed by the...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘GATZ’ at The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre

The program for GATZ claims that it is “A parody based on ‘The Great Gatsby’ Written by F. Scot. Fitzgerald.” (Note that Fitzgerald’s middle name is misspelled.) But a parody is, by definition, a...

Review: ‘Cabaret’ at Workhouse Arts Center

Everybody loves a winner. The song “Maybe This Time” reminds one of the spark of hope in a new beginning, what it feels like to cross a path and find someone and find a home. How very simple and very...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘. . . strand . . .’ by JUNK at Grays Ferry Crescent Trail Park

A transportive adventure awaits Fringe-goers in JUNK’s . . . strand . . ., as Brian Sanders and his stunning troupe contemplate the enigma of the time-space continuum in a dreamlike meditation on the...

Review: ‘Aglaonike’s Tiger’ at Venus Theatre

Aglaonike’s Tiger, written by Claudia Barnett and directed by Deborah Randall, is playing now at the Venus Theatre in Laurel, MD. The drama is based on the first recorded woman astronomer of Ancient...

Review: ‘The Heidi Chronicles’ at Rep Stage

Even successful plays get retired from the workforce after a few seasons. A select few, however, may go on to a new phase of wizened seniority. That is the case with The Heidi Chronicles, now getting...

Review: ‘In the Heights’ at Olney Theatre Center (in a co-production with Round House Theatre)

In a week that began with the repeal of DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – what better way to end it than with a musical about dreamers. For those children – many now young adults, among...

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...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘Hello Blackout!’ by New Paradise Laboratories at The Drake

The cast of Hello Blackout! spends a lot of time in the dark. In the opening moments of the show, lights slowly fade up and we faintly see five people staggered across the stage. They’re wearing black...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘United’ by The Revivalists at the Betsy Ross House

Performed in the candlelit courtyard of the historic Betsy Ross House and opening in the 2017 Fringe on September 9 – the same date, in 1776, that the Second Continental Congress declared our Colonies...

Review: ‘Two Trains Running’ at Spotlighters Theatre

Okay, I’ll say it: the production of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running is so packed with dynamic performances under the direction of the multi-faceted Fuzz Roark, it threatens to explode out of the...

Review: ‘An Inspector Calls’ at the Laurel Mill Playhouse

An Inspector Calls, by J.B. Priestly, is currently playing at Laurel Mill Playhouse, produced by Maureen Rogers and directed by Ilene Chalmers. Priestly was from the working class, albeit white...

Review: ‘Dreamgirls’ at Toby’s Dinner Theatre

Dreamgirls has followed the summer’s closet full of Dreamcoats into Toby’s Dinner Theatre of Columbia. That’s a lot of dreams, providing plenty of rich musical memories for theater fans to cuddle up...

Review: ‘Don Juan Tenorio’ at GALA Theatre

While Don Juan, the character, is a recognizable archetype of insatiable lust, the GALA Theatre’s Don Juan Tenorio, is an elegant, at times humorous, meditation on the psychic toll abject narcissism...

Review: ‘M. Butterfly’ at Everyman Theatre

Though written 30 years ago, few contemporary plays speak so profoundly to America’s current situation in the world as does David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, now playing at Baltimore’s Everyman...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘Fishtown – A Hipster Noir’ by Tribe of Fools at the Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake

A spot-on parody of the retro-style of film noir in a hilarious send-up of our ever-growing post-modern obsession with social media and technology, Fishtown – A Hipster Noir reaffirms Tribe of Fools’...

Review: ‘Noah: Apocalypse’ at LiveArtDC

We will now consider Amanda Quain’s latest play, Noah: Apocalypse, currently playing through September 18 at a bar in Petworth. Now is as good enough a time as any other to find oneself thinking about...

Page-to-Stage New Play Festival: Six Short Plays from Playwrights Collaborative

Some of the most interesting new plays unveiled at this year’s Page-to-Stage Festival–held over the Labor Day weekend at the Kennedy Center–were among those offered by Playwrights Collaborative, a...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘As the Matzo Ball Turns – The Musical’ by Heart of a Lion Productions at the Independence Seaport Museum

A ten-year account of the failed pursuit of his Hollywood dreams, Gene Duffy’s As the Matzo Ball Turns – The Musical is an ambitious stage adaptation of the eponymous 2012 autobiographical chronicle...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘Pericles’ by Die-Cast at The Rotunda

Brainchild of Director Brenna Geffers and Designer Thom Weaver, the newly-formed Die-Cast makes its public premiere in the 2017 Fringe Festival with an arresting re-envisioning of the rarely-produced...

Review: ‘Midnight Cigarette’ at Wolf Pack Theatre Company

Onto a landscape of food stamps, broken dreams, and Walmarts, director and playwright William Dean Leary has created an indelible portrait of life in rural America. Leary’s Midnight Cigarette, now in...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘Life Lines’ by Tangle Movement Arts at Neighborhood House

Life Lines is a new, collectively-developed work by the all-female ensemble Tangle Movement Arts. Tangle’s work is mostly derived from circus arts, particularly aerial performance on trapeze and...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘Game Show Show’ by Found Theater Company at the MAAS Building

Seen through the lens of the popular phenomenon of the TV game show, Found Theater Company’s latest ensemble-devised Fringe offering, Game Show Show, considers the ethical dilemma of how far a person...

Review: ‘Neverwhere’ at Rorschach Theatre

In 1582, a village parson heard the deathbed confession of a man named Richard Barley, who had married his butter churn. Barley claimed he had been bewitched into matrimony by a fairy called Apron Jon...

Page-to-Stage New Play Festival: ‘Blind Spots’ by Brave Soul Collective

Skipping puddles on my way to The Kennedy Center, I reminisced: “It’s a rainy day. The sky is gray. I think I’ll smile anyway.” My childhood friend, Nancy, taught me that and it has stuck with me for...

2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Review: ‘Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano’ by The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at the Bethany Mission Gallery

The banality of bourgeois life, the futile desperation to find meaning in mundane existence, the trivial chatter and vapid clichés used to fill the emptiness of everyday being, and the failure of...

Review: ‘Storyboard Series: Treasure Island’ at Hedgerow Theatre

After seeing a group of onstage pirates repeatedly singing “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,” I went out to the lobby of the Hedgerow Theatre in search of refreshment. Alas, there was no rum to be found....

Review: ‘Which Reminds Me’ at Act II Playhouse

If you’re a fan of Tony Braithwaite and his one-person (or sometimes two-person) shows – often performed at Act II Playhouse, where he is the Artistic Director – you know what to expect from his...

Review: ‘Julius Caesar’ at Scena Theatre at the Atlas Performing Arts Center

Diamond Julesy Gets It Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has recently become a cause célèbre. When Caesar was portrayed in a Public Theater production with a Trump-like costume and wig, there were protests....

Review: ‘Memphis -The Musical’ at Motor House

As a teenager growing up in the 1950s in a small New Jersey town just across the river from Philadelphia, I was hooked on R&B music, my transistor radio tuned to WDAS-AM, 1480 on the upside of the...

Spine: Bessie Smith and ‘The Devil’s Music’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

Fresh from World War I and a devastated Europe, The Roaring Twenties indeed roared across America. In the midst of a raging economic boom fueled in no small part by the advent of film and radio,...

Review: ‘Die Fledermaus’ at the Santa Fe Opera, and What We’ve Learned

This Santa Fe production of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus was the least Viennese of any I’ve ever seen. No, director Ned Canty did not set it in the American Southwest — which might have been an...

Doing Double Duty in the Philadelphia Fringe: An Interview with Jenna Kuerzi, Eric Singel, and Hannah Van Sciver

Three of the most enthusiastic veterans of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival are each doing not one, but two shows this year. Jenna Kuerzi finishes out the final installment of On the Rocks’ “Dead...

Film Review: ‘Ingrid Goes West’

Instagram should probably be billed as a co-star in Ingrid Goes West. Instagram’s rhythms; tap tap, CLICK, an empty heart goes lovely pinkish red; it’s mannerisms, and aesthetic, #perfect are the core...

Review: ‘The Devil’s Music’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

It’s no coincidence that The Devil’s Music – the show that celebrates the life and song of Bessie Smith – blew into Washington’s bustling H Street district at roughly the same time that Hurricane...

Review: ‘The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs’ at Santa Fe Opera

Steve Jobs was a revolutionary genius in communicating. He showed the world how to get “everything” anyone needed on a single gadget. Yet he was a spectacular failure in communicating with his friends...

Review: ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ at Santa Fe Opera

Editor’s note: Our Steve Cohen continues his posts on the arts scene in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a look at Santa Fe Opera’s production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Lucia di Lammermoor, the...

Review: ‘Other Desert Cities’ at Bucks County Playhouse

In the opening moments of Other Desert Cities, playwright Jon Robin Baitz introduces us to a wealthy Southern California family whose members love to play tennis – but their favorite sport is getting...

Review: ‘If Only… a Love Story’ at The Cherry Lane Theatre

The Cherry Lane Theatre, in Greenwich Village, is offering a new play by a New York playwright, Thomas Klingenstein, whose earlier works have been seen at the Lark Theatre Lab, the Atlantic Theatre...

Review: Silver Spring Stage 2017 One Act Festival, Weekend Three

One-act plays are tricky beasts. Playwrights must balance tension with plot and story. Too little tension, and the audience is left bored, slogging through countably interminable minutes until the...

Review: ‘Alcina’ at Santa Fe Opera

Editor’s Note: Our Steve Cohen is in Santa Fe, New Mexico this week, where he’s enjoying the local arts scene and seeing the work of Santa Fe Opera, a company with a close connection to Opera...

Review: ‘Prince of Broadway’ at the Manhattan Theatre Club

Hal Prince, producer/director extraordinaire is far too modest. His new offering at the Manhattan Theatre Club is so vastly entertaining that I hereby elevate him from PRINCE to KING OF BROADWAY for...

In the Moment: ‘A Little Night Music’ at Signature Theatre

Opening in 1973, A Little Night Music was part of the muscular turbulence of those well-remembered primal days of rage. Rage that bred inhaled cynicism like a needed eye-opening drug into the arts for...

Review: ‘A Little Night Music’ at Signature Theatre

If you are eager to get away from the turbulent news cycle, August humidity, annoying traffic, a mostly undone to-do list, disorder in your immediate circle, or fractures at a global or microscopic...

Review: ‘The Wizard of Hip’ at MetroStage

Yesterday may be far away for some; but a high-spirited comic primer of one male’s vainglorious attempts to be “hip” and his bewilderment at all things relating to women awaits from the exuberant,...

Review: The American Pops Orchestra Presents ‘Season 3 Opening Celebration! With Marilyn Maye’ at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater

Luke Frazier, American Pops Orchestra founder and Music Director, kicked off the Orchestra’s third season with a delightful concert featuring acclaimed jazz legend, Marilyn Maye. Maye was backed by a...

Review: ‘Azul’ at La Fábrica Theater

Did you ever wonder why Picasso chose to paint in blue? The earliest stage of his famous career is known as his Blue Period, and this new play by Tanaquil Márquez shows how and why he made that...