Milo Shapiro

VISITING THE PAST FOR PRESENT LAUGHTER If you’re looking to expose yourself to the plays of Noël Coward, this is where to start. Not only did he write Present Laughter (in six days!) to amuse himself AND create the main character based on himself, but he even chose to play Garry in the original London…

WE BUILT THIS SILLY ON ROCK AND ROLL Most musicals start with a premise, develop a plot, and then write songs to fit the themes. Rock of Ages flips the process by starting with classic rock songs of the 1980s (Styx, Journey, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Steve Perry, Poison, and more) and tying…

LIFE AIN’T JUST A BOWL OF CHERRIES IN 1903 RUSSIA Written and set in 1903 Russia, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard would be the master playwright’s final creation. Unless one already has knowledge of that time and place, the play — even with North Coast Rep‘s superlative production — becomes much easier to understand and…

ANOTHER FEATHER IN MOXIE’S CAP Playwright Anna Ouyang Moench uses the setting of a wooded area — beautifully designed at MOXIE Theatre by Robin Sanford Roberts — as the backdrop of this beautiful family drama. The father, John (Mike Sears), is just about equally bound to his liberal and earth-loving principles, his love of bird-watching,…

A STORM IS BREWING IN THIS FAMILY Perhaps the two most chilling words that can be uttered in a family are “Alzheimer’s” and “dementia.”   Physical pain, as horrible as it may be, is something we can relate to and try to bear together, but slowly losing one’s memories, faculties, and function is hell and heartbreaking…

NO ONE’S WEEPING ABOUT THESE GREAT BLUES Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. – Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis The blues is a style of music, created in the early 1900s in the deep South.   Not surprisingly, The origins of the blues are poorly documented. According…

SPELL “DELIGHTFUL” “D-E-L-I-G-H-T-F-U-L” — DELIGHTFUL! OB Playhouse used to do all of their own productions, but nowadays it is primarily a rental space.   When I saw that The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was going to play there, I wondered if it would be from OBP’s most frequent renter, Wildsong Productions. After all, Wildsong…

2 PIANOS + 4 HANDS = 194  HAPPY ATTENDEES Around twenty years ago, piano bars started featuring “dueling pianists,” who would go back and forth, taking turns playing pop songs and, occasionally, interacting. It was all the rave for a little while, so it wouldn’t be surprising if theatergoers thought that’s what this show (written  by Ted…

REELING IN A SWEETLY SUNG FAIRY TALE Some theater should cause you to think deeply, stir your motivations, and cause you to be a better person for the ride you were on. And some theater is just to make you smile. Big Fish is a smiler : and there’s nothing wrong with that. Will Bloom…

THE CHILDREN IS NOT CHILD’S PLAY One of the challenges of reviewing theater is figuring out how much to divulge without giving away what the playwright wants to let unfold. The Children is one of those plays where it’s almost impossible to say what it is about in any sort of cohesive way because twists…

WOMEN IN PANTS? WHERE WILL IT ALL END? It’s 1942 and most of the men in Rhode Island are off to war. As such, most theatres, especially those who focus on the heavily male casts of Shakespeare, are shut down. But Oberon Playhouse’s assistant director Maggie Dalton (Melanie Lora) has another idea. With her husband…

WHEN SHERLOCK ISN’T A SURE LOCK Arguably Arthur Conan Doyle’s most successful Sherlock Holmes mystery The Hounds of the Baskervilles was actually first run as a serial from 1901-1902. It drew excited readers to pick up the next issue of London’s Strand Magazine to find out what would happen next in the dramatic story. As…

PLANT YOURSELF AT SDMT Let’s start with the fact that it’s a show about a plant that craves human blood. Oh, and there’s this nerdy botanist Seymour who raises him, whom the plant intimidates into fulfilling its needs. That shouldn’t work. That really shouldn’t work. Yet, oh, it does! The 1982 hit off-Broadway musical (based…

SKI RESORT SKETCH SKILLFULLY SKIPS ALONG AND SKYROCKETS INTO OUR HEARTS Saturday Night Live has been notorious over the years for coming up with some bits that are funny enough to fill an entire seven-minute sketch while other skits have the joke run thin two minutes in with five minutes remaining. One can almost imaging…

COME SEE THIS CABARET, MY FRIEND One of the wonderful things about period pieces, including musicals, is that they rarely feel dated because the book writer (Joe Masteroff, in this case) starts with the premise that the show isn’t happening now. What’s marvelous, and sometimes chilling, about this fifty-six year old book is that it’s…