Bruce Norris won the Pulitzer in 2011 and the Tony Award in 2012 for best play when his Clybourne Park played on Broadway after a successful run off Broadway in 2010. Critics and public alike responded to its insights and accuracy in presenting authentic characters of different races. The press and the public also responded […]
Archives for November 2013
There Is a Happiness That Morning Is
– a play written in rhyming couplets and so your reviewer rises to the challenge – If you teach a poet two hundred years’ dead, it’s not surprising that you could be led to a dalliance, but the stakes get raised when your taste for outdoor sex leaves you appraised in your humping by the […]
Inventing Van Gogh
A miserable and lonely artist is invited to paint a Van Gogh forgery. He initially spurns the offer, but when he later contemplates going along with the scheme he finds his reality blended with the world of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and other historical characters. That is the intriguing setup for Steven Dietz’s Inventing Van Gogh, […]
The Summoning of Everyman
It is a bold company which reaches back to 1530 to launch its season, and a bolder company still to stage a play about making account to God in this relentlessly secular city and age. But the principal commendation which The Edge of the Universe Players 2 earns for producing The Summoning of Everyman is […]
Man of the House (Or: How I Tracked Down My Dad, the Spy)
Pablito’s father abandoned his wife and seven-year-old son with the parting admonition that Pablito would have to be the “man of the house.” Pablito is left with a man-sized hole in his heart that six years later causes him to search for his father in Man of the House, an emotionally involving world premiere Kennedy […]
Betrayal
Harold Pinter arrived on the London theatre scene in the mid 1950s along with John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Edward Bond, David Storey and Arnold Wesker, among other playwrights who were determined to shake things up. His early plays were dark and mysterious, often obscure, seemingly naturalistic plays with simple titles like The Birthday Party, The […]
King John
It is 1962, and we are in some terrible parallel universe. Nuclear destruction has unloosed itself on the world, and as a mother herds her three children into a fallout shelter, we hear the air-raid sirens – and the clarion voice of Jack Kennedy, stilled near these fifty years now, giving us what counsel as […]
Sister Act
Ah, the movie-turned-into-musical trend. We’ve seen so many on the Great White Way in recent decades. In some cases, this can result in musical theatre aficionados asking “was that really, really necessary?” In other cases even the stodgiest of the musical theatre elite might admit the stage production of some particular Hollywood blockbuster offers an […]
4th Annual All New Cabaret Macabre
Happenstance Theater’s 4th Annual All-New Cabaret Macabre is an absolutely lovely show for this time of the year: a little spooky, a lot of whimsy, and plenty of morbid humor to keep you laughing throughout the evening of their brand new and fan favorite vaudeville sketches.
The Snow Geese
A strange thing happens when good actors find themselves cast in a play in which their characters are ill defined or not defined at all. These actors, trapped on their own, make choices in order to help them add meaning to the literate but unrevealing lines their author, in this case Sharr White, gives them.
Fabulous Mayas
Get ready, get set, go to GALA for a fabulous burst of imaginative stagecraft of ancient folklore. “Why should a rabbit have such magnificent antlers?” one masked creature of the forest asks another. That’s because the Creator (Bob Sheire) and the Shaper (José “Chema” Pineda) gave them to Rabbit (Cecilia Cackley). So the jealous Deer, […]