Milo Shapiro

DON’T KNOW WHETHER TO LAUGH OR CRY You know that close friend or relative you have who  can talk about the most trivial stuff in their world and you’ll still ask leading questions for more details? Like, “So what did you do when the can opener wouldn’t go all the way around?” But if someone else…

DIAGNOSIS: DANCER Human nature loves to ponder the impossible to answer: What does food taste like to other people? What does a colorblind person imagine color looks like? What is it like to be inside the mind of someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)? There may never be a show about the first two, but…

BREWING UP SOME GOOD CHUCKLES IN THEIR KITCHEN Cooking shows are typically feel-good shows. The calm of Martha Stewart. The sweetness of Rachel Rae. The edge of Emeril Lagasse. Of course, it’s easy for them to make everything appear to go well on those high-budget programs; editing allows blunders to be reset and re-shot. So…

THESE PASSENGERS WON’T STAY IN THEIR SEATS! Die-hard fans of So You Think You Can Dance get to know their choreographers. For me, there was Sonya Tayeh (Moulin Rouge! The Musical) : and then there was everyone else. Her startling juxtapositions, demanding symmetry, and physical boundary pushing was unmatched by others. Until now. Now, there…

WHEN KING WAS THE QUEEN OF THE COURT Ask most people what they know about Billy Jean King, other than fact that she played tennis, and there’s a good likelihood that you’ll hear a story about Bobby Riggs. Anna Deavere Smith’s play turns that inside out by focusing on almost everything but that to show…

AS IF TELENOVELAS WEREN’T MELODRAMATIC ENOUGH FOR YA’… As someone who blew off after-school activities because he just couldn’t miss General Hospital (in the grand days of Luke and Laura vs. Elizabeth Taylor), I’m not in a position to cast stones at the many flaws of telenovelas. Quality or not, the format is opium to…

XANA-DOOZY OF A MUSICAL Playwrights of musicals have frequently, with varying degrees of success, taken a successful non-musical movie and worked it into a staged musical. Billy Elliott, Waitress, and Mean Girls are among many movies given a whole new life on stage through song and dance. What makes 1980s’ Xanadu a very different case,…

VISHNU WERE HERE First, a little history lesson:   In the Hindu religion, the god Vishnu incarnated ten times as different “avatara,” which can be interpreted different ways, including “descendent.”   The final incarnation, calling himself Kalki, came to end a long period of darkness, degeneration, and chaos. While knowing this is not critical to following Aditi…

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…