SCENA Theatre continues to mount vital international works in its 26th year, kicking off the season with a stage adaptation of the 1979 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Marriage of Maria Braun. This cult favorite from the New German Cinema movement is a cultural import worthy of SCENA’s brand, and it’s about time that […]
Archives for September 17, 2013
Hands on a Hardbody, Original Broadway Cast Recording
When you say “the recording is better than the show was” sometimes it is a positive comment on the recording and sometimes it is a negative comment on the show. In this case, it is both. The recording captures fine performances by the likes of Keith Carradine, Hunter Foster, Keala Settle, Jim Newman and the […]
The Pitmen Painters
Usually when theatre tackles the subject of art is does so through the eyes of artists (Red, Sunday in the Park with George), or at least looks at art through the lense of educated men (Art). Yet the brilliance of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters comes from its fresh approach of showing the impact of […]
Gee’s Bend
MetroStage’s production of Gee’s Bend is everything I could possibly hope for. The story spans seventy years in ninety minutes and explores characters behind the famed Gee’s Bend quilts by focusing on a mother and two daughters in an isolated part of rural Alabama. The small African American community tucked into the “bend” of the […]
Tristan and Isolde
There are many brave aspects of this elegantly sparse production, including its hypnotic single set of rippling silk walls and composer Richard Wagner’s romantic yearnings stripped-down to their essence. Director Neil Armfield has pared so much “production” away that it feels like a chamber opera with the focus concentrated on the interior thoughts and emotional […]
GALA’s world premiere: interludes from Spain’s Golden Age. We talk with director Jose Luis Arellano Garcia
A play composed of interludes? In pursuit of tracking down what I suspected would be an interesting story about GALA Hispanic Theatre’s world premiere of Cabaret Barroco: Interludes of Spain’s Golden Age, I sit across a table from the director, José Luis Arellano García, from Madrid, Spain. Right away, there is rapport. He tells me […]
Philip Goes Forth
George Kelly is one of those excellent playwrights who flourished in the Golden Age of Broadway. Born in 1887 in Schuylkill Falls, Pennsylvania, he was the seventh of ten children born to the ‘remarkable “Philadelphia Kellys”. One of his brothers, Walter C. Kelly, was a vaudeville headliner, brother John sired Grace Kelly the film star, […]