Adam Gwon’s chamber musical Ordinary Days is ostensibly the story of four young adults searching for love and their “life stories” in New York City.  Yet the real love story at the heart of the show is the mythical Manhattan of stage and film, a romantic and nurturing setting where characters find themselves and relationships, […]

When a play about Martin Luther King, Jr. is set at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis on the evening of April 3, 1968, it’s easy to assume that you know where the play is going. But The Mountaintop, by Katori Hall and being staged by NextStop Theatre Company, still has a few tricks up its sleeve. […]

Despite being one of the last books Roald Dahl ever wrote, Matilda has remained one of the British author’s highest-selling works. Even so, The Guardian notes a significant jump in Matilda’s global sales since 2016, the year of Brexit and the last U.S. presidential election. At its core, Matilda is a lesson in learning about […]

The decade known as The Sixties contained so may different mini-eras it’s a wonder that those of us who lived through it didn’t all become split personalities. At times näive, hedonistic and fiercely political yet ignorant of events beyond the soda fountain, it’s the time in America when even the teenagers grew up. Beehive suggests the […]

Singin’ in the Rain seems like the type of beloved movie that shouldn’t be made into a stage version, with its perfect 1952 film, directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and named by the AFI as the Greatest. Movie. Musical. Especially when you have a cast of eight, and an orchestra of two. Unless the […]

Pre-dinner martinis turn into two bottles of champagne, which turn into nightcaps of Benedictine. The alcohol just keeps flowing during Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, and things get more and more amusing as the play gets looser and zanier. It doesn’t hurt that Elizabeth Anne Jernigan and particularly, Teresa Spencer, are pretty great at playing tipsy. […]

Imagine a mass of humans in a great hubbub and babble of conversation. It could be the House of Representatives before the gavel sounds, or the nave of a church in the moment before services commence. The conversations ricochet off the walls and intersect with each other. They could be about the Khmer Rouge, for […]

Broadway obsessives who can rattle off titles like Shogun: The Musical, Smile and Ruthless with as much authority as The Music Man and Les Misérables will find a special place in their heart for the wickedly clever meta-musical [title of show].