KEN LUDWIG’S BASKERVILLE: A SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY — LONG TITLE, MEDIOCRE SHOW
Before we get into this, let me say off the top that, to accommodate my schedule, the company allowed me to attend Baskerville’s first and only preview performance. I’m very grateful for that. Things may tighten up as the run progresses. Okay, here we go. What the...
PARIFAM: Come Back for Act 2
A better play is trying to emerge here, but you’ll only know that if you stick around for Act 2. In Canadian-Iranian playwright Aki Yaghoubi’s debut script Parifam, the eponymous central character is an architect who’s building Iranian museums in major cities around...
TAKE THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL
Director Ron Reed’s production of The Trip To Bountiful is consistently tender and nuanced. It’s a thing of beauty. I encourage you to see it. In Horton Foote’s script, which premiered in 1953, Mrs. Carrie Watts engineers an escape from the cramped apartment in...
A Mixed Bag of RED VELVET
Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet is primarily concerned with two things: anti-Black racism and acting styles in the nineteenth century, when the play is set. These things overlap. Ira Aldridge, the hero of Chakrabarti’s story, is a historical figure, a Black...
PARADE: Impressive, Hard to Fully Access
There is so much to love in this production — and it left me strangely unmoved. The 1998 musical Parade is based on the real-life story of Leo Frank, the Jewish supervisor of a pencil-making factory in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1913, he was accused of murdering Mary...
Dil Ka Is “Of the Heart” But It Needs More Polish
Young playwrights often need — and deserve — more help than they get. In playwright Lee Nisar’s Dil Ka, a 26-year-old Pakistani-Canadian woman named Zahra is preparing biryani for a proposal meeting, which means that she’s about to feed a potential groom and his...
AN INTERVENTION: This Show Needs One
For me, sitting through this mounting of Mike Bartlett’s An Intervention was an endurance test. I started checking my watch half an hour into its 80-minute running time, and my chair got very hard. My primary beef is with the script, but I also suspect the direction...
JADE CIRCLE: Lovely, Incomplete
Playwright and performer Jasmine Chen’s Jade Circle is a delicate, stylish, sometimes resonant piece of work that could use more concrete storytelling. Jade Circle is about reclaiming the language of one’s origin. In Chen’s autobiographical script, she shares the...
SUNRISE BETTIES: Blood will have blood
Writing about Sunrise Betties is depressing, not because of the content, which includes drug dealing, police corruption, and a ridiculous amount of gore — but because it’s all such a mindless waste of time. In Cheyenne Rouleau’s new script, which is set in the...
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