Theatre
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Little Island Presents Marriage of FIgaro
Anthony Roth Costanzo is Gender Fluid
By: - Sep 07th, 2024The major event at New York’s Little Island this summer is an abbreviated version of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro with all seven roles sung by premier countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. It will be performed through September 22. Zack Winokur produces.
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Three Tall Persian Women By Awni Abdi-Bahri
World Premiere at Shakespeare & Company
By: - Sep 09th, 2024Three Tall Persian Women by Awni Abdi-Bahri, an emerging playwright, is having its world premiere at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox. Three generations of women gather to celebrate the anniversary of the passing of the husband of Nasrin. Her daughter Goinar, a recent MFA graduate, has flown in from New York. Things are not going well when Shayan, a most eligible bachelor, arrives with flowers. All hell breaks out when they drink magic mushroom tea.
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The Prom
Musical About Sexual Discrimination in High School
By: - Sep 10th, 2024Four New York theater performers hope to attract attention for what they purport to be the selfless act of inducing an Indiana high school to reverse the cancellation of its prom because a lesbian student planned to attend with a girlfriend as her date. Based on a true story, the visitors encounter unexpected headwinds. Despite notes of pathos and bitterness, a joyous tone prevails, and the play ends on a hopeful note.
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Un Ballo in Maschera
San Franciso Opera's Outstanding Production
By: - Sep 13th, 2024In this opera drawn from history, Sweden's Gustavus III loves Amelia, the wife of his friend and ally Renato. When the husband finds out, he joins assassin conspirators from the disaffected nobility. This Verdi masterpiece, replete with dramatic music, is given the finest treatment by accomplished principals and creative staging designers.
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Hell's Kitchen Musical on Broadway
Aiicia Keys Tells Her Story
By: - Sep 14th, 2024Alicia Key has created herself as “Ali” in the musical Hell’s Kitchen now playing on Broadway. Keys grew up in the Manhattan Plaza complex, a few blocks from Times Square. Built during one of New York’s deep downturns, the building was supposed to be an upper middle class apartment house. Discounted apartments did rent. It became one of New York’s most desirable residences for artists. It formed the artist Keys.
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Maggie at Goodspeed
New Musical Launches Fall Season
By: - Sep 16th, 2024Maggie is a heartfelt musical that should appeal to a wide range of audiences. It is the antithesis in many ways of what some would expect of a Goodspeed musical – there is not a tap dance or big dance number in sight.
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The Magic Flute at Opera San Jose
A Compelling Rendering of Mozart's Masterpiece
By: - Sep 16th, 2024Tamino falls in love with the daughter of the Queen of Night, Pamina, from her picture. To win her hand, he must conquer three trials to become an initiate into a religious order. This classic receives a sterling production from cast, creatives, and conductor, 19-year-old wonderkind Alma Deutscher.
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The Handmaid's Tale
San Francisco Opera's Powerful Look at Socio-political Dystopia
By: - Sep 19th, 2024Handmaids act as birthing surrogates in the dystopian land of Gilead, the successor to the United States after a coup by Christian fundamentalists. Like others, Offred was captured trying to escape the country and has been detailed as a handmaid. She now fears exile to the "colonies" or execution for not following the strict Ten Commandments based rules of Gilead. Poul Ruders's music is as chilling as the original story from Margaret Atwood.
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Private Lives
Noel Coward's Romp at American Conservatory Theater
By: - Sep 20th, 2024Ex-spouses have remarried to other partners on the same day. Seeing one another on adjoining terraces at their honeymoon hotel, the exes rekindle their love-hate relationship. Will they re-unite? What about their new spouses? Are they a match?
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Opera Philadelphia Opens a New Season
Missy Mazzoli's New Opera Asks: Do You Hear a Hum
By: - Sep 22nd, 2024Opera Philadelphia is a company that has done everything right for the past decade and yet continues to struggle to reach an audience. On April 25 it was announced that Anthony Roth Costanzo, a Princeton-educated counter tenor who not only attracts audiences as a singing artist but also has successfully experimented with programming, would begin his term as general director and president on June 1. His first public act as head of the company was to offer tickets at $11 and then pay-what-you-want or can on top of that.
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Primary Trust at Barrington Stage
2024 Pulitzer Prize for Eboni Booth
By: - Sep 23rd, 2024Early on in his role as artistic director, Alan Paul, saw Primary Trust at its off Broadway premiere. He booked it for Barrington before it won a Pulitzer Prize. The production at Barrington Stage couldn’t be more timely. Not surprisingly this deliciously intimate drama is well on its way to a sold out run.
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The Weir By Conor McPherson
It Was a Stormy Night in the Pub
By: - Sep 29th, 2024Regarded as the most popular of McPherson's, plays a generation on The Weir is being given an intimate, lively production, directed by Eric Hill. Its trope, locals gathered in a small pub in a remote village verges on a cliché of Irish culture. The one act play conflates copious amounts of “small” shots of whiskey accompanied by pints of Harp or Guinness. As we snidely learn the real men drink stout.
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Robert Downey Jr. at Lincoln Center Theater
Playwright Ayad Akhtar Tackles AI
By: - Oct 01st, 2024Robert Downey Jr.. is everything you could hope for and more in this New York stage debut as the title character in Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal. Downey started his career playing a dog in Pound directed by his father. Familiar to filmgoers, his physical presence on stage at the Lincoln Center Theater combines his casual warmth with an edge demanded by a role in which his character may well have precipitated a suicide.
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The Daughter of the Regiment
Livermore Valley Opera's Comic Charmer
By: - Sep 30th, 2024An orphan Marie was adopted by a French army regiment as an infant. She promised to marry only a member of the regiment but falls in love with an outsider. Complications ensue as she learns that she was born to a marquise and is spirited away to live a noble life and have an arranged marriage within her new station. But this is a comedy. Do you really think that's going to happen?
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Angels in America - Part 1 - Millenium Approaches
Classic Returns to Bay Area Home
By: - Oct 01st, 2024Tony Kushner's award-winning two-part classic centering on homosexuality and AIDS during the epidemic in the 1980s is given a magnificent production by Oakland Theater Project with taut direction and exceptional acting. Fiction that is anchored in reality with one real historical figure, also drifts into fantasy. Its powerful treatment finds corollaries in today's world.
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Primary Trust at La Jolla Playhouse
2024 Pulitzer Play by Eboni Smith
By: - Oct 07th, 2024The La Jolla Playhouse presented the West Coast premiere of playwright Eboni Smith’s Primary Trust, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Thirty-eight-year-old Kenneth, played by Caleb Eberhardt, lives in Cranberry, NY, a small town a short ride from Rochester. Kenneth’s small town consists of the usual bowling alley, a few banks, a church, and a smattering of small family-owned businesses. His single mom died when he was ten which led to a life growing up in foster homes
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Steel Magnolias
Art Buzz Theatrics and Florida Theatrical Events
By: - Oct 12th, 2024A funny and touching co-production of the comedy-drama Steel Magnolias produces tears, laughter. The mounting in Ft. Lauderdale runs through Oct. 20. Art Buzz Theatrics and Florida Theatrical Events are the co-producers.
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Alabama Story by Kenneth Jones
Now ar Ivoryton Playhouse
By: - Oct 15th, 2024The first act seemed to drag – this was the result of the overly slow development of the story by the playwright Kenneth Jones and the pacing by director Todd L. Underwood. The pacing needed to be picked up
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Putting it Together
Sondheim Musical Revue
By: - Oct 15th, 2024Pembroke Pines Theatre of the Performing Arts stages "Putting it Together." The show is a Sondheim revue featuring many of the late great lyricist/composer's works. The production runs through Oct. 20 in Pembroke Pines, near Ft. Lauderdale.
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Angels in America - Part 2 - Perestroika
The Closing Episodes of Epic Drama of 1980s
By: - Oct 16th, 2024Part 2 - Perestroika provides closure on many of the relationships and issues raised in Part 1 - Millennium Approaches. Thematically, it invokes the need for change in order to go forward and thrive, rejecting the resistant bastions of vested interest - entrenched religions and conservative politics.
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Yaga
Marin Theatre's U.S. Premiere of Multi-genre Play
By: - Oct 17th, 2024The tradition of Baba Yaga, an old haggard witch, exists in many Slavic cultures. Playwright Kat Sandler integrates witchcraft themes into a comic detective mystery with three actors playing 14 parts.
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No Love Songs
Goodspeed’s Terris Theatre in Chester
By: - Oct 19th, 2024During the 80 minutes or so, we hear 11 songs. Most are duets between the two characters – Jessie and Lana. Jessie and Lana are fictionalized versions of Falconer and Wilde and their story. From the first meeting, when Lana goes to a bar and meets the older Jessie through a courtship of sorts, the birth of their son, and Jessie’s departure on a US tour with a band, where they are the backup/opening act.
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Henze's Prince of Homburg in Frankfurt
Important Composer Gets a Perfect Production
By: - Oct 22nd, 2024Contemporary composers scramble for relevant subject matter. Opera companies overlook repertoire which is excellent and seldom staged. As the 100th anniversary of Hans Werner Hene's birth approaches in 2026, his work, produced in timeless fashion, offers fresh opportunities. Frankfurt Oper shows the way.
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Tristan & Isolde
San Francisco Opera's Fine Production of Wagner
By: - Oct 25th, 2024When composing this opera, Richard Wagner was obsessed with love fanned by his infatuation for the married poet Mathilde Wesendonck and death driven by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The two existential forces are melded in the opera's thematic thrust "liebestod" (love-death), which is also the dominant leitmotif in the music. While the orchestral score soars, the dramatic action is grounded, yet it remains a pioneer of modern music.
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Frederick Douglass Comes to Hudson Hall
Anthony Knight Jr. Combines Negro Spirituals with Douglass' Text
By: - Oct 25th, 2024Hudson Hall in the Hudson Hall Opera House will present No Cowards in Our Band, an intertwined stage piece that combines nine spirituals with the reciting of original text by Frederick Douglass. In this drama, an aging and contemplative Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). considers the social, economic, and political ramifications of slavery and the Civil War and their impact on the future of the United States.
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