The Big Meal is the big deal: the moments in life that really matter – birth, love, and death – chopped up into digestible bits and soaked in a vinegar-ish marinade for eighty minutes or so. It is also the big feel, in that its only subject is what we feel in our hearts as we go through these things, and the big for real, in that it is about characters who are relentlessly ordinary, and have no special tools or challenges, except the ones most of us have. [Read more...]

When a once-thriving, centuries-old art form all but vanishes from the vocabulary of beautiful things, a sadness rises. Especially when, before now, the isolated art form has remained in the mountains of Tokushima on one tiny island off the coast of Japan, rare, untapped and virtually unknown to the outside world.

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It would take an ambitious, forward-thinking theatre to capture British playwright Roy Williams’ unique blend of kitchen-sink drama and urban patois. Fortunately for all of us, the play found its way to Studio Theatre, whose sharp, well-realized production of Sucker Punch is another impressive production in an already-strong season. [Read more...]

It’s clear from minute one of Astro Boy and the God of Comics that writer and director Natsu Onoda Power is in very familiar (and very beloved) territory. Ms. Power – whose 2009 book, “God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post World War II Manga,” was the first full-length study of Tezuka and his work in English – has delivered a play that practically bursts with reverence for the Astro Boy character (who made his debut in a 1951 Japanese manga) and his creator (the titular “God of Comics”). [Read more...]