Smokey Joe’s Cafe
Director Brenda Didier and music director Jeremy Ramey have mounted a fabulous musical revue of the songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller prolific composers of 60- 70’s pop, rick, R & B. blues and gospel tunes
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MADNESS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE: A Love Story
Beginning with Poe’s character, Christian Gray’s gifted voice is beautiful for the gentle moments as well as the madness. He whispers, modulates and yet explodes passionately while crying out lines from his poems.
Metamorphoses
Zimmerman’s take on the Ovid poems necessitates being stage in water – here a square two foot deep pool as a universal symbol of transformation. Featuring many of the original cast and veterans of past productions, the 2012 production has a zest and polish seldom witnessed on stage. Metamorphoses is a vivid, often funny, and totally engaging and fluid theatrical piece of storytelling
Freshly Fallen Snow
Playwright Lewis puts a human face on the contradictions facing scientists as they treat emotional scares from memories. This is a cautionary tale that resonates today as actual scientific research on editing memories is taking place
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
Yet there is much to enjoy, loads of funny bits and the engaging use of the space with full audience participation becomes endearing. I had to admire the skill, craftsmanship and energy of the cast. They work so hard to tell their stories and to entertain us that we both admire them and applaud their efforts.
Sweet Bird of Youth at the Goodman Theatre
Sweet Bird of Youth features Williams’ lyrical language and deep sense of internal pain that often become a part of his characters. Loss of beauty and feelings of unworthiness are themes Williams like to explore. He also most effectively uses direct address toward the audience to hammer home comments. The three hour, two intermission drama flows nicely into a breezy evening of theatre.
Equivocation
Equivocation is a dense, wordy work containing material about the complex relationship between art and politics; between the truth and lies. Are Shags (and us) ready to pay the price for telling the truth?
Geography of a Horse Dreamer
This quirky play is 85 minutes of weird dark comedy. Santee and his benevolent sidekick Beaujo (Rudy Galvan) have spent months hiding their abduction horse dreamer, Cody, whose amazing ability to dream the winners of horse race…
The Big Knife
It is nice to see a play by an outstanding playwright that is seldom produced. Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife is a 1949 play and a 1955 film that was Odets’ attack on the shenanigans that pervaded Hollywood in the days of the studio produced films centered on contract players.
Good People
Good People is a funny, honest and vividly naturalistic slice-of-life comic drama that intelligently defines the nature of just what a ‘good person’ actually is. Smartly, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire presents the complex, contradictorily nature of human behavior that has the key characters struggling with the affects of all their life decisions.