A nonlinear remembrance of family and self, Fun Home was lauded as a groundbreaking piece when it opened on Broadway in 2015, winning the Tony for Best Musical that year. Based on Alison Bechdel’s extraordinary graphic novel of the same name, this autobiographical musical follows Bechdel in triplicate through the years: her ten year old self, […]
Review: A Wonder in My Soul at Baltimore Center Stage
“Laugh or cry; it’s up to you,” my mother used to say. At Baltimore Center Stage’s stirring production of acclaimed playwright Marcus Gardley’s play A Wonder In My Soul, you can have both–belly laughs that come from deep recognition and tears that spring to your eyes with the salt of memory. You may not have […]
Review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Director Judith Ivey puts her stamp on Williams’ steamy drama
Hold onto summer heat and humid emotions just a little while longer with Baltimore Center Stage’s juicy production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Public Theater’s Stephanie Ybarra will be new Artistic Director of Baltimore Center Stage
Stephanie Ybarra, The Public Theater’s Director of Special Artistic Projects, will be the new Artistic Director of Baltimore Center Stage, the company has announced. She succeeds Kwame Kwei-Armah, who left Baltimore Center Stage to become Artistic Director of London’s Young Vic Theatre in January of this year. Ybarra, a graduate of Baylor University and the Yale […]
Baltimore Center Stage announces its 6 play 2018/2019 season
The first post-Kwame Kwei-Armah season at Baltimore Center Stage will feature the classics: established, new and aspiring. It will start off with one of the most celebrated plays in the American canon and close with a world premiere by a Lorraine Hansberry award recipient, and feature two recent Tony laureates.
Review: Baltimore Center Stage’s savage staging of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (review)
Those pigs. Can’t trust them, can’t ignite a revolution without them. Why can’t they just be content with being what they are–bacon? Pigs, propaganda, the proletariat and politics proliferate in Center Stage’s visceral, beautiful and chillingly relevant production of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s 1945 allegorical novel about freedom and dictatorships.
Long Day’s Journey into Night at Everyman Theatre (review)
In 1919, Eugene O’Neill wrote a play called Exorcism. It is about shame. It is set in 1912, and in it the protagonist confesses to his boozy friend that he committed adultery with a prostitute because adultery was the only ground upon which he and his wife could get a divorce. It had one production […]
Skeleton Crew at Baltimore Center Stage (review)
That a play set in an auto parts stamping factory is part of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival is reason enough to see Skeleton Crew, Dominique Morisseau’s fine, emotionally feral play that features two blue collar women who are not just good at their jobs, but so highly skilled they are the only ones who […]
Big changes coming to theatres in 2018
The greatest sign of stability in a culture is, paradoxically, its ability to absorb change. There was a collective holding of breath when Joy Zinoman announced her retirement in 2009; could Studio stand the absence of its only Artistic Director? We needn’t have worried. Studio’s fine, and so are we.
Lookingglass Alice at Baltimore Center Stage (review)
Lewis Carroll’s famous tales of Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass wears a new look in Baltimore Center Stage’s Lookingglass Alice. As reimagined by David Caplin, Wonderland becomes urbanized, Carroll’s poetry becomes spoken word, and a petulant Alice becomes a young woman of color on a journey of self-confidence.
Shakespeare in Love at Baltimore Center Stage
Before he was Shakespeare with a capital “S,” he was just plain Will (Nicholas Carriere), an ordinary guy—a fledgling playwright, somewhat disheveled, a bit of a skirt-chaser, and frantic for a play that will rival the mellifluous prose of his friend and rival Kit Marlowe (Avery Glymph).
The Christians at Baltimore Center Stage (review)
What keeps our butts in the pews? Is it faith, fellowship, fear of hellfire, or infatuation with the charismatic preacher up at the pulpit?