MISS MATCH MISMATCH Though it’s usually the other way around, sometimes musicals actually improve on the sources that inspire them. Arguably, West Side Story is stronger stuff than Romeo and Juliet, She Loves Me a warmer show than Parfumerie, The Boys from Syracuse a fresher take on folly than A Comedy of Errors, and, most…

THE WIZARD OF NOTES For half a century Harold Arlen did to notes what Monet made with colors: He found ways to make them make us very happy, equally sad, and never bored. A warm new offering from City Lit Theater, I’ve Got the World on a String:  Harold Arlen’s Songs of Love and Loss is,…

LORCA’S RUNAWAY BRIDE Elemental, darkly poetic, driven by death, Federico Garcia Lorca’s domestic tragedy Blood Wedding is the 1932 installment of his peasant-primitive “Rural Trilogy.” (The others are Yerma,  about a woman’s desperation to be fecund, and The House of Bernarda Alba,  a claustrophobic saga of sexual repression.) An open homosexual later murdered by Franco’s goons, Lorca…

TAKE-OUT THEATER “This is not how I thought my future would be.” Bittersweet, broken-spirited, resigned to mediocrity, that lament fits all the characters in David Jacobi’s inexplicably named Mai Dang Lao, a world premiere from Sideshow Theatre Company. What Steppenwolf Theatre’s The Flick did for low-wage popcorn sweepers at a cineplex, this much shorter (85…

A TOO-CASUAL CRUELTY Macbeth, Claudius, Goneril, and Iago were monsters–horrible but not actual. Richard III, however, is Shakespeare’s vilest historical villain. In his short, ugly reign the last of the Plantagenets bathed in blood, offing all obstacles to the throne, including his two young cousins slaughtered in the Tower. He died in battle in 1485,…

SHAW FRACTURES A FAMILY In 1896 George Bernard Shaw wrote You Never Can Tell (the title suggests a plot packed with surprise), his answer to the recently successful The Importance of Being Earnest. He’d beat Oscar Wilde at his own playful plotting and acerbic wit. Well, we know how well that went, considering how often…

NEW ON NEW The debut of a quartet of new dance pieces was not without some unanticipated excitement. A patron managed to sneak two non-service dogs into the Museum of Contemporary Art’s theater; one growled his approval–before the work was over. The video promoting the dance pieces accidentally came on five times–but the young dancers…

THE PRICE OF POPULARITY Westerberg High is pretty low. This Reagan-era preparatory school in Sherwood, Ohio is a cesspool of snobbish belittlement. The Buckeye hellhole includes a witches’ trio of mean girls named Heather (Duke, Chandler and McNamara) and Ram and Kurt, disposably dumb jocks swimming at the bottom of the gene pool. Then there…

BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE Grim gray barracks, fortress walls topped with razor wire, smart salutes from sentry towers, cut-away trailers deployed as offices and housing, fluorescent lights draining the colors from mess camps, cold apartment facades–all plunged in a techno-industrial rock mix. That’s the button-down, by-the-numbers, and very militarized backdrop for this authoritarian…