Milo Shapiro

BAKING UP SOMETHING GOOD AT WILDSONG Come on, Wildsong. You’re only two seasons old, in a tiny theater, have mostly young company players, and are on a ridiculously small budget. There’s no way that adds up to even considering doing one of Stephen Sondheim’s toughest musicals, Sweeney Todd, let alone doing it this brilliantly. Sondheim’s…

SEEING FIDDLER AGAIN AND AGAIN IS A GREAT TRADITION It’s no surprise that this 1964 triumph ’” with an irresistible book by Joseph Stein and unimprovable songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick ’” keeps surprising us with our own humanity. It’s 1905 in a small Russian village called Anatevka, and a fiddler plays a…

SANDWICHING GOOD STORYTELLING BETWEEN TWO SLICES OF COMEDY Remember Linda Lavin’s old TV sit-com Alice? And her co-waitresses: the sassy Flo (“Kiss my grits!”) and the ditzy Vera at the truck stop diner? And the owner, cranky-but-loveable Mel, giving them hell through the kitchen passthrough as he cooked everything up? Well, flip that around so…

Learning another language is like becoming another person. — Haruki Murakami Years ago, I ran a teambuilding class using improv games for an I.T. group.   Despite the diversity of heritage and appearances in the group, there was only one person in the group who was an immigrant. “Min” had a thick Chinese accent and, despite…

BILLIE’S LIFE WASN’T NO HOLIDAY The title actually says a lot. When a star as bright as Billie Holiday, the sultry jazz singer whose career lasted from 1929 to 1958, is performing at a bar and grill in her hometown of Philadelphia, late in her career, something is clearly amiss. Billie explains that she loves…

DUBLIN YOUR PLEASURE WITH GOOD DRAMA AND COMEDY With a somewhat-forgettable title and a rather vague plot summary on the website, one walks into Outside Mullingar not quite sure what they are going to see. By the end of the first scene of this 95-minute one-act play, one could still be wondering: “Is this going…

KNOWING WHICH IS WITCH The word “crucible” has two very different meanings. One is a pot in which substances are heated to high temperatures. Another is a situation in which people are severely tested. Which definition is The Crucible based on? A case could easily be made for either and likely both for playwright Arthur…

MATHEMATICAL PLOT ADDS UP TO SOLID DRAMA David Auburn is brave. Writing and marketing a play that, on the surface, centers on math sounds like a recipe for disaster. In a world where most adults pray that the tip at a restaurant will appear pre-calculated for them at the check’s bottom, selling a play about…

OVER THE MOON In much of our lives, we get to choose the people we surround ourselves with. Shy of that, we’re at least usually around those with whom we share some common interest, such as taste in movies or having kids on the same soccer team. And then there are those locations where we…

SHE AIN’T LITTLE AND SHE AIN’T NO FELLOW! The Little Fellow is playwright Kate Hamill’s account of the life of the infamous high-society se퓳 worker Harriette Wilson (1786 – 1845).   Harriette counted many of England’s nobility among her clientele. She was known to be a savvy, wise-mouthed, outspoken individual and found men who liked that…