All-star cast to stage reading of The Normal Heart for Forum fundraiser
October 13, 2011 By 1 Comment
Forum Theatre will stage a reading of Larry Kramer’s Tony Award-winning The Normal Heart on Monday, November 7 at 7.30 as a fundraiser for the company. [Read more...]
Portrait of Poe: with the help of actor Mark Sanders, Poe’s ghost fights eviction by Baltimore City
October 11, 2011 By 4 Comments
“We do Bar Mitzvahs.”
In the benefit production Portrait of Poe, that’s about as close to optimism as Edgar Allan Poe, gets on October 8, 2011, at Area 405. And the show hasn’t even begun. Having revealed his freelancer roots – anything for money! – Poe (in the body of Baltimore actor and writer Mark S. Sanders) disappears backstage. [Read more...]
When the Dancing Stopped: The Real Story of the Morro Castle Disaster …
October 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
How a disaster at sea changed the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes
There are times when a theatre buff comes across something he (or she) wants to share with others of like mind which doesn’t happen to be a theatrical book, cd or dvd. This is one of those times. [Read more...]
after the quake
October 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
We have, by virtue of our earthquake last August, an inkling of what the people of Kobe, Japan suffered sixteen years ago. The deep inharmonious rumble – the incomprehensible undulation of the floor – the evacuation – the questions; the weak jokes – and everywhere, the chittering of television news reports. Now add to that chunks of buildings falling out of the sky, clouds of toxic dust, screams of the dying and their sudden silence, and a sense of irreparable loss, and we learn what the Japanese knew then: that an earthquake can make the sturdiest of things – buildings, dams, nuclear power plants – as delicate as spun glass. What can it do to something as fragile as the human psyche? [Read more...]
Nevermore
October 11, 2011 By 2 Comments
It must be Matt Month. How else can you explain not one but two musical productions in the area featuring the music of composer Matt Conner? [Read more...]
Man and Boy
October 10, 2011 By 1 Comment
Frank Langella’s performance is spell-weaving
In late 1963, Terrence Rattigan’s play Man and Boy opened on Broadway with a cast headed by film star Charles Boyer, where it limped along for 54 performances. It followed the London run, which was also brief. [Read more...]
Our Town
October 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
There is magic afoot in Ellicott City, specifically at the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park (PFI for short), often referred to simply as “The Ruins.” PFI, which once housed a girls’ boarding school, sits atop the highest hill in Ellicott City. [Read more...]
The Rivals
October 10, 2011 By 1 Comment
What Constellation Theatre Company giveth, Center Stage taketh away.
Comedies of manners and farce usually send this critic screaming into the night and searching for a bar that serves cocktails in birdbath-sized glasses, but Constellation’s delightful production of A Flea in Her Ear made me soften my stance on these theatrical genres. That, however, proved temporary, as The Rivals at Center Stage has restored me to my former loathing of anything with bloomers, servants imparting skeins of exposition, hoop skirts, and hands fluttering to temples with exclamations of “Alas, poor me!” [Read more...]
Norman
October 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
It isn’t often that a production will justify a reviewer’s use of the delightful word “pixilated,” especially as a homonym. That said, if ever there was a time, it is now. In Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon’s utterly transfixing and transporting 4D tribute to Scots-Canadian pioneer filmmaker Norman McLaren, here for a brief three-day engagement at the Kennedy Center, both the filmmaker and his revolutionary animation films are nothing less than pixilated. Friday night, with the assistance of dancer-choreographer Peter Trosztmer, they drew their animated audience irresistibly along with them. [Read more...]
Mike Daisey urges a deeper look at the legacy of Steve Jobs
October 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
In the end, Steve Jobs failed to “think different,” in the deepest way
In his brilliant monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, seen here at Woolly Mammoth last March, Mike Daisey laid out both his obsession with Steve Jobs and Apple’s technology, and the shocking truths he discovered in a visit to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said ”I will never be the same after seeing that show.”
