Theatre

Glengarry Glen Ross is David Mamet's best known play. To make it fresh for audiences who know the dialogue by heart and who often hear it daily in the office where it has become young business people's way of talking, is not easy. Rick Yaconis and his young company succeed, of course, with a little help from the great playwright.

Hailed as one of the best new plays on Broadway, Time Stands Still is the story of Sarah, a photojournalist, and James, a foreign correspondent, who are picking up the pieces of their lives after a recent brush with death while fighting with their own individual humanity. With excellent acting, this production looks at intense lives in our contemporary turbulent time.

With an intermission in between the program of ten, ten minute plays at Barrington Stage, for the most part, went by in a blur. It also entailed absorbing tons of information during a compressed and intense experience. It may have been like the mini bar in a hotel. If you knock back all those nips it adds up to an intoxicating orgy of theatre,

Theater is alive and well across the country. Perhaps because people simply are not satisfied by looking at canned images all day and communicating with others in tweets and Facebook postings, legitimate theater is thriving. In nooks and crannies surrounding the Denver Arts Performing Center, small companies with special missions are filling their houses.

Based upon Jung Chang's 20th Century family memoir, A.R.T.'s presentation of Wild Swans is visually stunning but dramatically flat. The drama follows three generations of a family of strong-willed women facing the political and social problems of the Chinese Communist regime the late 1940s through the exploding urbanization after Mao's death. Needing polishing and a better ending, this drama has theatricality and epic proportions that can be built upon.

Buchner died at 25 but left behind an enduring legacy. Woyseck is more familiar as Alban Berg's opera, but the play is dynamite, particularly as presented by a small, young New York Company, Stasz/Pruitt.

Barrington Stage Company, under the leadership of Julianne Boyd, Artistic Director and Tristan Wilson, Managing Director, has had to make a change to its 2012 Mainstage season. The previously announced production of Arthur Miller’s “The Price” has been dropped from the season. A Broadway revival is planned of the 1968 Tony-winning drama. In its place is Miller’s Tony winning “All My Sons":

Shakespeare & Company has provided the best cure for the winter blues with a scrumptious, witty, madcap production of Moliere's Learned Ladies. Deftly directed by Tina Packer assisted by Jenna Ware they have evoked comic brilliance from a compelling cast of awesomely gifted actors. The production continues through March 25.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis was created just like Enron itself. Figuring out how to create financial instruments from 'air', by simply promoting them. A few make a ton of money. Most people suffer. This lively production in Chicago makes you wonder if we can stop the trend.