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Theater Review: THE FATHER (Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Theater Wit)
THE SOUND OF A BRAIN BREAKING Uncertainty is the default drive behind the 95 excruciating minutes of French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Father. Seldom has a staged mystery shifted so suddenly and strongly between competing realities. As the protagonist Andre says, “There’s something funny going on here.” But it’s not amusing: Yes, The Father is crammed with mistaken…
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Las Vegas Theater Review: VEGAS! THE SHOW (The Saxe Theatre at Planet Hollywood)
GIMME THAT OLD TIME VEGAS In front of a necropolis where Vegas marquees and hotel signs of old are the tombstones, an old, black janitor (the multi-talented Tezz Yancey) comes out with a broom and reminisces with us about the Vegas of old. It doesn’t take an idiot savant to know what cards the creators…
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Broadway Review: CALL ME MADAM (Encores!)
CALL ME UNDERWHELMED For City Center’s 75th anniversary season, Encores! has revived a show from its second year, Call Me Madam — only the second show it has ever repeated. Irving Berlin’s 1950 star vehicle for Ethel Merman was a smash hit for Encores! in 1995 as a concert starring Tyne Daly (the recording of which…
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Las Vegas Theater Review: KÁ (Cirque du Soleil)
GOOD KÃ, BAD KÃ There is so much money, time and skill invested in KÃÂ — the Cirque du Soleil mid-east, tribal-flavored spectacle at MGM in Las Vegas that you don’t want to say anything bad about it. The sheer grandeur and never-before-seen technical stagecraft eclipses one’s desire to note that this is, basically, a $200…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TWO TRAINS RUNNING (The Matrix Theatre)
RUNNING ON FULL After producer Sophina Brown’s celebrated production last year of King Headly II — one of ten dramas of the late August Wilson’s 2oth-century chronicle The Pittsburgh Cycle — she staked a claim to produce the entire oeuvre. Her promise is Los Angeles’s gift. Opening last weekend at the Matrix Theatre, Two Trains Running, a…
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Theater Review: JULIA SWEENEY: OLDER AND WIDER (Geffen Playhouse)
OUR LOVELY FRIEND RETURNS AT LAST I have never seen Julia Sweeney on film or television. Okay, almost never: there’s Pulp Fiction and Stuart Little. Yet while Sweeney is notable for having been in those films, I can’t quite remember who she played. She’s been working steadily in projects but I guess I haven’t had the desire…
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Theater Preview: AN INSPECTOR CALLS (The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare)
SOCIETY UNDER CLOSE INSPECTION An Inspector Calls was first performed in 1945 at a time of great change — both World Wars were fresh in the minds of the people, women had become more prominent in the workplace, and it was possible to be class mobile, which is the idea that people can move upwards in class through…
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Music Review: PHILIP GLASS SYMPHONY NO. 12 (World Premiere with the LA Phil)
SHATTERED GLASS The Lodger symphony, Philip Glass’s brand new Symphony No. 12, is a work that the composer had discussed with David Bowie prior to the glam-rock king’s death (the two were friends and mutual admirers for many decades). Glass wanted to turn the 1979 album Lodger, a collaboration with Brian Eno and producer Tony…
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CD Review: SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD (2018 Encores! Off-Center Cast Recording)
A WHIRL AT A NEW NEW WORLD Like a breath of fresh air, this new recording of Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World far exceeded my expectations from this uneven song cycle. This is an early work from the Tony-winner for Parade and Bridges of Madison County. “It’s about one moment,” Brown once…
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Opera Review: ELEKTRA (Lyric Opera of Chicago)
AN ELEKTRA WITHOUT ELEKTRICITY The first show I ever reviewed in Chicago was The Hypocrites’ All Our Tragic at the Den Theatre, a marathon twelve-hour distillation of every surviving Greek tragedy. It was an extraordinary experience. I’ve also seen a one-night performance of the complete Oresteia of Aeschylus and read both Sophocles’ and Euripedes’ versions…
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Theater Review: TITANIC (Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont)
A MORE INTIMATE TITANIC MADE EPIC It’s telling that the 1997 musical Titanic won Tony Awards for each nomination — Best Musical, Peter Stone’s book, Maury Yeston’s score, Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, and Stewart Laing’s colossal, four-story, tilting set — yet it didn’t receive one nomination for acting. (I saw the original on Broadway and you definitely…
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Theater Review: THE B-SIDE: “NEGRO FOLKLORE FROM TEXAS STATE PRISONS” A RECORD ALBUM INTERPRETATION (Wooster Group at REDCAT)
B-SIDE MYSELF Breathes there a soul who hasn’t sung along with a favorite album? And, ah, if the songs we sing were rare and challenging and related to one’s life, we might have all approached The Wooster Group’s Kate Valk, as Eric Berryman did with his 1965 Elektra recording Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,…
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CD Review: ASCENT (Matthew Lipman, viola, Henry Kramer, piano, on Çedille Records)
AN ACT OF ASCENSION For years, violas and violists have been the butt of some truly funny jokes: Q: How do you keep your violin from getting stolen? A: Put it in a viola case. Q: What’s the difference between a dead skunk and a crushed viola in the road? A. Skid marks before the…
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Theater Review: HELLO, DOLLY! (National Tour)
BUCKLEY BUCKLES A BIT, BUT DOLLY DEFINITELY DELIVERS To start with, let’s agree to never say “Goodbye, Dolly.” Thornton Wilder’s genius for the common touch isn’t just a golden legacy in Our Town or The Skin of Our Teeth, both perfect comedies of life. There’s almost as much warm wisdom in The Matchmaker, Wilder’s craftily-plotted 1955 mating romp that…
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Theater Review: A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE & MURDER (Porchlight Music Theatre; Ruth Page Center)
A DEATH OF FRESH AIR It’s a tour de force times ten as Monty Navarro, distant heir to the D’Ysquith fortune, slaughters his way to an earldom and marriage, for better or worse, with a doting cousin. A romp where vengeance gets served up hot and cold, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder is convulsing the Ruth…
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Chicago Theater Review: HOW TO CATCH CREATION (Goodman Theatre)
CONSIDER CREATION CAUGHT IN THIS SEMINAL WORLD PREMIERE It’s a tour-de-force to take home and reverently recall: A Goodman Theatre world premiere, How To Catch Creation lives up to a lovely title. In little more than two hours, Christina Anderson chronicles the intersected passions, both procreative and artistic, of three very different couples. They’re contrasted and combined…
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Theater Review: SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (South Coast Rep)
IT COULD HAVE BEEN MURDER Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a musical that never fails to impress, no matter how many times it’s been seen. It tells of Benjamin Barker, a Victorian-era barber who returns to London, having been imprisoned on false charges, to exact vengeance on those responsible for the tattering…
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Concert Review: BERNADETTE PETERS (Disney Hall)
SAINT BERNADETTE Now that she’s hung up her late-Victorian hat after taking over for Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway last year, the inimitable Bernadette Peters has embarked on another international tour, making a stop at Disney Hall last Tuesday to share her love of theater, singing selections from musicals as if for the…
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Theater Review: US/THEM (Chicago Shakespeare)
OUT OF THE BLOOD OF BABES It’s a probably thankless and certainly unsettling undertaking: Us/Them is an hour-long performance piece by two young members of the Belgian troupe BRONKS. It dares to depict the 2004 Beslan school siege and massacre from the point of view of two child victims: One survives the take-over by 35 Chechen separatists….
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Theater Review: AN INSPECTOR CALLS (The Wallis)
MAKE A CALL ON THIS INSPECTOR In Stephen Daldry’s architectually inspired revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, an astute mixture of comedy of manners/tragedy of class/family crisis/ socialism versus capitalism/whodunit, the audience is asked, along with a trio of curious children, to get past that heavy red velvet curtain and enter a world of…
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