Theatre
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Tony Winner Fun Home
Touring Company Visits Chicago
By: - Nov 08th, 2016Fun Home, the prize-winning show (five 2015 Tonys including best musical), opened at Chicago's Oriental Theatre last week for a very short run. The play, based on Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic novel, is a story of growing up trying to figure out yourself and seeing your parents through new eyes as you mature.
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Sharr White's Annapurna
Launches CV Repertory Theatre's Season
By: - Nov 08th, 2016The narrative of Sharr White’s play is not its strongest asset. It’s the performances of the actors that win the day. The technical credits at CV REP are always top tier.
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The Little Flower of East Orange in Chicago
Play by Stephen Adly Guirgis at Eclipse Theatre
By: - Nov 10th, 2016Stephen Adly Guirgis opens the veins of family feelings in his plays, with his gritty, piercing dialogue. He writes scenes we usually don’t see in public, scenes that reveal long histories of family abuse that become painful memories. He does this in Between Riverside and Crazy and The Motherfucker with the Hat, He is is a member of New York’s highly regarded LAByrinth Theater Company. Little Flower premiered at LAByrinth in 2008, directed by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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Finian's Rainbow Arcs Over New York
Irish Repertory Mounts Charming Production
By: - Nov 11th, 2016FInian's Rainbow was first produced in 1947, but the tough issues it raises are very contemporary. In Southern United States blacks and whites live comfortably, but are challenged by land grabs, Sears Roebuck salesmen and a Senator ripe for conversion.
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White Lights Festival Presents All That Fall
Beckett's Radio Drama Re-imagined
By: - Nov 10th, 2016The brilliance of Samuel Beckett is captured by the Pan Pan Theatre Company of Dublin. Beckett's magical words never had more music and humor. The irony of death's grip is fully evoked in our mind's eye as we sit in rocking chairs, imagining figures. Beckett is laugh-inside funny, his words ricocheting around the room.
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After by Michael McKeever
World Premiere at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center
By: - Nov 12th, 2016“Now what” are the words playwright Michael McKeever wants us to ponder after watching his devastatingly honest, explosive, unflinching and all-too-topical play titled simply “After.”
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First Annual Berkies Awards
Theatre VIPs Jam Mr. Finn's Cabaret
By: - Nov 14th, 2016The Berkshire theatre gilterrati crammed into Mr. Finn's Cabaret for a raucous evening celebrating The First Annual Berkshire Theatre Awards. Seventeen arts journalists voted on 120 nominees in 25 categories chosen from artists in the 75 live theatre productions mounted in Berkshire County and adjacent areas between October 1, 2015 and September 30, 2016.
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Playwright Lauren Gunderson Takes Action
An Offer We Cannot Refuse
By: - Nov 15th, 2016Any theatre company, group, or person who wants to do a reading of my feminist political comedy, The Taming, on Inauguration Day 2017 can do so for free, with thanks to Playscripts.
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From Silence by Anne Marilyn Lucas
NY's Theater for the New City
By: - Nov 16th, 2016The brutally honest play From Silence by Anne Marilyn Lucas is based on her observations of second generation Holocaust survivors and their families. The piece centers on a Jewish Holocaust survivor who, as a coping mechanism, has remained silent about her experiences in detention.
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Jon Robin Baitz's Vicuna
World Premiere at Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City
By: - Nov 16th, 2016“Vicuna” is comedy rich in innuendo and roman à clef portrayals. I’ve seen several of Jon Robin Baitz’s plays in the past, but this one is a little different from his usually serious efforts as a dramatist.
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Tony Winning Play on the Road
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
By: - Nov 18th, 2016The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time closed on Broadway in September after 800 performances (including 23 previews) and won five Tony Awards, including Best Play and garnering a host of other honors. Our correspondent reports on the touring company that performed briefly in Palm Beach, Florida.
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Remembering Edward Albee
A Critic Recalls Interactions with the Playwright
By: - Nov 18th, 2016When Edward Albee died, the social networks were inundated with spontaneous comments. One admirer reminisced about the exquisite instructions on preparing the perfect crème brulee in Counting the Ways and made me realize how many such excerpts have stayed in my mind over the years. I’ve been thinking about them like memorializing snapshots – all those stimulating tricks with words, like Agnes wondering whether she can say “I dropped upstairs” and Jerry asking about saying “A dog I knew.”
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Heisenberg by Simon Stephens
Manhattan Theatre Club Through December 11
By: - Nov 07th, 2016British playwright Simon Stephens and director Mark Brokaw weave an engaging obbligato of nicely nuanced, performances by two terrifically talented stars who know how to draw the audience into their small, compelling story and make it sing. It's currently on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club.
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Relativity at TheaterWorks Stars Richard Dreyfuss
St. Germain Play Asks Can a Great Man Be a Good Man
By: - Nov 07th, 2016While the theories of Albert Einstein ushered in the nuclear age his private life, as examined in the new Mark St. Germain play Relativity, was just as volatile. Although he crafted an eccentric and accessible public persona we learn that he was a misogynist and misanthrope. The drama evokes a hypothetical tug of war between Einstein (Richard Dreyfuss) and an abandoned daughter Margaret (Christa Scott-Reed) who has used deception to visit and confront him.
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Hand to God
GableStage in Coral Gables, Florida
By: - Oct 14th, 2016“Hand to God,” the biting, darkly comic, disturbing, thought-provoking and meaty play is receiving a solid southeastern premiere at GableStage in Coral Gables, Florida through Oct. 30.
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Roundabout Presents The Cherry Orchard
Diane Lane, Joel Grey, John Glover, Chuck Cooper
By: - Oct 16th, 2016The Cherry Orchard was Anton Chevkov’s last play. He drew a picture of an old Russian family at the end of their run, their beloved cherry orchard and the hundreds of acres that it fills will be auctioned in August to pay the debts of Liuboff Andreievna Raneyskaya. Liuboff, the role originally created by Chekhov’s wife, is now enlivened by Diane Lane in her return to the New York stage. Lane’s first Broadway appearance was in The Cherry Orchard decades ago.
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2016 Berkies Announced
First Annual Berkshire Theatre Awards
By: - Oct 17th, 2016There has been extensive media coverage of the First Annual Berkshire Theatre Awards. The winners of The Berkies have been announced. There will be an awards celebration 5 pm on November 13 at Mr. Finn’s Cabaret in Pittsfield. In this first round of awards Barrington Stage Company and Shakespeare & Company dominated in most categories. The smash hit Pirates of Penzance ran the table. The Larry Murray Award, named for the founder, will be the only suprise of the gathering of critics, media and theater mavens.
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Pirandello’s Henry IV
Remy Bumppo’s Chicago Production
By: - Oct 19th, 2016The absurdist playwright Luigi Pirandello wrote the play in 1922. The current production is based on an adaptation by Tom Stoppard. Nick Sandys’ direction makes the most of the witty dialogue written by the always engaging Stoppard.
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Williams' Night of the Iguana
Palm Beach Dramaworks
By: - Oct 24th, 2016In “Night of the Iguana,” largely considered the prolific Tennessee Williams’ last commercial success, the playwright, no stranger to symbolism, once again uses a vivid symbol to represent characters trapped in a prison of loneliness and unfulfilled desires.
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They’re Playing Our Song in Boca Raton
Forty Years After Andrea McArdle Originated Role
By: - Oct 24th, 2016Today, almost 40 years later, you’ll find Andrea McArdle on the Wick Theatre stage, co-starring in a musical, They’re Playing Our Song, that made its Broadway debut just about two years after her Broadway bow.
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Hunchback of Notre Dame in Ft. Lauderdale
Slow Burn Theatre Company Rings the Bell
By: - Oct 25th, 2016Composer Alan Menken, lyricist Stephen Schwartz and book writer Peter Parnell have created a heartfelt, heartbreaking and riveting version of the popular Victor Hugo novel.
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Red Velvet at Chicago's Raven Theatre
Actor Ira Aldridge Challenged London's Racism
By: - Oct 27th, 2016In 1833, the African-American actor Ira Aldridge (Brandon Greenhouse) was the first black man to play the leading role in Othello in a London theater.
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The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
Revival at Hartford Stage Company
By: - Oct 31st, 2016In 1987 August Wilson's The Piano Lesson premiered at Yale Rep. It was one of two plays from the ten in the decades spanning Pittsburgh Cycle that won a Pulitzer Prize. It is being revived in a production at Hartford Stage Company. The stunning, vintage, hand crafted upright piano from the original Yale production has been borrowed for this occasion. It is the centerpiece for sibling tension that informs the iconic Wilson drama.
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One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace
Playhouse Creatures Theatre Company Off Broadway
By: - Nov 02nd, 2016The title of the play, which feels like a cross between Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter's work, comes from words in a poem by English poet John Donne (1573-1631).
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The Bottle Tree by Beth Kander
Premiere at Chicago's Stage Left Theater
By: - Nov 02nd, 2016The bottle tree is a background symbol in Stage Left Theatre’s haunting new play by that name—a world premiere script by Beth Kander—about the U.S. gun culture and its most horrific example, school shootings.
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