Tennessee Williams, midway through his career, wrote the quintessential Southern family drama: filled with scheming relatives, family wealth, and an unspoken secret, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955.
Brigadoon casts its spell at Compass Rose
The mystical village of Brigadoon is a blessed place, appearing out of the Scottish Highlands’ mists once every hundred years with its 18th Century innocence and delightfullness intact.
If I Hold My Tongue at Compass Rose Theater (review)
If I Hold My Tongue is a new work by playwright Patricia Henley. Focusing on a group of women in a halfway house in Baltimore, it explores what it is to be a parent, a member of the community, and finally, a responsible adult.
UpClose: Patricia Henley, Women’s Voices Theater Festival
Compass Rose Theater is producing Patricia Henley’s If I Hold My Tongue, set in Baltimore, MD, which opens September 17. She is the author of three novels, four short story collections, two chapbooks of poetry, a stage play, and numerous essays.
T. S. Eliot’s Becket play, Murder in the Cathedral
Faith and politics. God and king. Those are the weighty affairs teetering in the balance of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Compass Rose Theater recently turned its intimate space into a feline playground when it produced another work featuring the verse of the American-English poet, Cats. Now, the Spa Road location stands in for […]
Herding Cats – casting and housing actors for Compass Rose hit musical
For three years, Lucinda Merry-Browne, director of the Compass Rose Theater, has been hoping to stage Cats in the intimate setting that houses the Annapolis, Md.-based stage. She finally procured the rights and it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time for the theater, as it also had another of T.S. Eliot’s productions on […]
Tiny Compass Rose does big time Cats
If you would know a cat, you must first watch him dance, and then hear him sing, and after that you will understand his story. So it is with the cats in Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of T.S. Elliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Though Elliot’s poetry – which was written for his […]
A Raisin in the Sun at Compass Rose Theater
There is a scene in Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark drama A Raisin in the Sun where the troubled, young husband and father Walter Lee Younger feels he has lost any chance of finding his dream. But his loving, lioness of a mother, Lena, looks him in the eye and tells him she never stopped trusting him […]
Another Day on Willow St
Frank Anthony Polito’s new play, being given its world premiere at Compass Rose Theater, owes a debt of gratitude to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, both being quiet plays about ordinary days and the remarkable moments within them. Yet Another Day on Willow St is very much its own rumination on relationships, communication, aspirations and disappointments. […]
The Sound of Music
Seriously, a musical about nuns and Nazis? The only other musical I know of about Nazis is the fictional Springtime for Hitler. And yet The Sound of Music is a vital part of the American canon, a Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpiece, a story of such iconic wholesomeness that it is practically a fairy tale, showcasing […]
Eleemosynary
Family. F-A-M-I-L-Y. It can be difficult no matter how easily you can spell it, no matter how eccentric you choose to be in order to escape it, no matter how far you run from it. Which is exactly how Echo (Maya Brettell), Dorothea (Ilona Dulaski) and Artie (Janel Miley) attempt to make sense of it […]
Compass Rose offers an ambitious 4 play season for 2013-2014
Annapolis-based Compass Rose Theater will produce a 2013-2014 season which features a graduate of the 2007 New York Fringe Festival and productions of three well-known and much-honored plays, the company announced yesterday.