by Colin Thomas | Sep 12, 2024 | Review
There is a particular kind of pleasure that comes from just giving yourself to a show because it’s so seamlessly assured and stimulating. It’s what folks are talking about when they say they were spellbound by a performance. For almost all its running time, that’s the...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 10, 2024 | Review
I returned to Bard on the Beach’s Hamlet to see Chirag Naik in the title role. (In a scheduled change, he has taken over from Nadeem Phillip Umar Khitab.) The news isn’t good. Naik overacts, and that exacerbates an underlying problem with director Stephen Drover’s...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2024 | Review
Bruce Ryan Costella, who wrote and is performing Muttnik, is a gifted writer and actor: those things are givens. In Muttnik, he tells a story inspired by Laika, the stray dog who, for the sake of research, was rocketed into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 with just...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 8, 2024 | Review
Tokyo puppeteer Yanomi Shoshinz is a charmingly openhearted performer, but I was only engaged by about half of her material. Happy Go Lucky consists of four puppet routines and Shoshinz starts with the weakest. In it, a Janus-faced female puppet engages in a series of...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 8, 2024 | Review
In her solo bouffon show, Sabrina Wenske looks fantastic. Playing Baba Yaga, the witch of Slavic folklore, she wears an enormous straw headdress, and her painted-on moles are ghoulish blue. Her abundant energy is wicked and promises danger. “You are so cute with your...
