JULIET: A REVENGE COMEDY — Got Me
By the end of Juliet, A Revenge Comedy, I was completely into it. In the script, which was written by Ryan Gladstone and Pippa Mackie, Juliet from Romeo and Juliet finds herself in a kind of Shakespearean Groundhog Day: she keeps falling in love, losing her...
THE SHADOW WHOSE PREY THE HUNTER BECOMES: The One That Got Away
For about the first 20 minutes of The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, I was enjoying the uniqueness of the experience. By the end of the show’s 60-minute running time, I was struggling to stay awake. The problem, no doubt, was partly with me.
CHOIR BOY: But Not Story Boy
The music is sublime. Sublime. But, especially as it’s presented in this production, the script is not. When Choir Boy started, with Andrew Broderick, who plays the central character, Pharus, singing a cappella, and then, when he was joined, in perfect harmony, by...
THE MIRROR: Not So Reflective
I have a very strong hunch that, if any other person who was in the audience with me last night had the opportunity to review The Mirror, they’d be giving it a more enthusiastic write-up than I’m about to. When they were all on their feet, clapping wildly, I was in my...
GERTRUDE AND ALICE: The Continuous Present
This might sound hokey, but watching Gertrude and Alice made my insides feel like spring: I was filled with surprise and freshness. This script was created by a trio of playwrights: Anna Chatterton, Evalyn Parry, and Karin Randoja. In it, writer Stein and her life...
LORENZO: A Love Story
It’s always interesting when you’re won over by a show — completely won over — even after you’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. The first movement of British artist Ben Target’s monologue Lorenzo didn’t engage me. Target’s career has mostly been in stand-up and, as he...
Snow White: like getting stuck in a windstorm
Maybe I caught a particularly rough performance of Carousel Theatre’s Snow White. At the Saturday matinee I attended, the audience was small and there were a lot of adults, which could partly explain why the show didn’t come close to generating the kind of runaway...
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella Caught Me by Surprise
Director Johnna Wright’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella does what it sets out to do extraordinarily well. It’s entertaining, well produced, and moving. This is despite some stiff odds. Rodgers and Hammerstein originally wrote Cinderella for...
A (bumpy) Christmas in Wales
This production is kind of like an old pillow: deliciously comfy sometimes but too often shapeless. Director Sarah Rodgers and her father Denis have adapted Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a poetic piece of prose that runs about 20 minutes if you speak it...
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