Once: not twice

Once is more than enough. Yes, Once won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical in 2012, along with six other Tonys. And it has hauled in a bunch of other prizes, too, but man it’s boring! Here’s the plot: boy meets girl; they dither endlessly. To be...

As You Like It: you’ll love it

It could have been a stupid gimmick. Instead, it’s transcendent In this Bard on the Beach production of As You Like It, director Daryl Cloran has excised about half of Shakespeare’s text and replaced it with Beatles songs. Cloran sets his production in British...

Macbeth: bloody loud

Macbeth! All shouting! All the time! Okay, they’re not shouting all the time, but there is a heck of a lot of hollering in director Chris Abraham’s take on the Scottish play and all of that volume keeps us on the surface of the text. Moya O’Connell’s Lady Macbeth is a...

Slime: beautifully designed, tangentially told

She never steps onto the stage, but Shizuka Kai is the star of Slime. Kai designed the set, props, and puppets and her vision is one of the major forces that holds this production together. In Slime, playwright Bryony Lavery imagines the third international conference...