Director Michael Ryan Fernandez,  selected by Firebelly Productions for its 2009 Young Directors Project, is obviously a smart fella who has given serious thought to his craft. He gives us every reason to believe that he will be around for a long time. [Read more...]

When you think of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart may not be the first work that springs to mind.  The quirky dark comedy about the three Magrath sisters of Hazlehurst, Mississippi lacks the grand importance of works that usually reap such prestigious awards.  Yet the charms and depth of the play are amply displayed in the pleasing new staging by Firebelly Productions. [Read more...]

• A Body of Water
• by Lee Blessing                            
• Directed by Michael Ryan Fernandez
• Produced by Firebelly Productions
• Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy
• After seeing Firebelly’s spellbinding, well-polished production of Lee Blessing’s poetic play A Body of Water, I felt a hunger for human interaction. The edge-of-seat suspense kept me holding my breath until the last revelation. [Read more...]

• LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
• By Eugene O’Neill
• Directed by Kathi Gollwitzer
• Produced by Firebelly Productions
• Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy

In this soul-stirring Firebelly production of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize winning, autobiographical play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the ghosts of the past ebb and flow like the tides. Sounds of the sea draw us into a parlor of faded elegance that serves as a sitting room cluttered with books and dominated by a round, claw-foot Victorian table to suggest it is 1912.

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• Nothing Sacred
• By George F. Walker
• Based on the novel Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
• Produced by Firebelly Productions
• Directed by Robb Hunter
• Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Once in a great while, a production can be of such high quality that it redeems a mediocre script.  Firebelly’s production of Nothing Sacred is not one of those instances.  However, it presents a few terrific performances which ought to provide us with good cheer.

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Written by William Shakespeare

Produced by Firebelly Productions

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Closeted conspirators: Dave Daniels (Aguecheek), Brian Lee Huynh (Fabian) and John Tweel (Belch) (Photos Ray Gniewek)

This is good Shakespeare. This is damn good Shakespeare.

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s most difficult comedies, full of implausible developments and astonishing cases of mistaken identity. Firebelly just plays the heck out of it, squeezing out every conceivable laugh with fully realized characters, slam-bang comic timing, and assured, well-conceived direction. In the end, as every comic playwright from Aristophenes to Christopher Durang has known, if the laughs are a-comin’ the plausibilities don’t matter. [Read more...]

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Proof

by David Auburn

Produced by Firebelly Productions

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Proof is less a great play than a great opportunity for actors to put together a memorable and satisfying evening of theater.  The slender plot revolves around the discovery of a complex and significant mathematical proof locked in the desk drawer of Robert (Don Kenefick,) a brilliant but long-demented mathematician, now dead.  Did the dead scientist write the proof?  [Read more...]