From the works of Edgar Allan Poe to Hollywood’s The Fly, classic American horror stories indulge our fascination with the decay of the body. They’re overrun with maggoty cadavers, tell-tale hearts, and monsters that stalk us through dark alleys, graphic reflections of our fear of death. European tales, on the…
Nobody knows if Scott Joplin knew Irving Berlin. In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, Mark Saltzman’s well-meaning musical, however, the two composers not only meet cute (Joplin, disguised as a composer’s agent, appears in the office where Berlin works as a sheet-music publisher), they reminisce, play tunes, and dip together…
Love may indeed be a fragile thing, but its clumsy male and female protagonists can’t help “endlessly crashing into each other like two bumper cars.” That’s the observation of one character in the musical revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, an affable if not particularly insightful commentary on…
Nobody who has seen the off-Broadway version of The Fantasticks at New York City’s Sullivan Street Playhouse will recognize the set of the appealing new production at the Hollywood Playhouse. (That’s a lot of us, given the 15,000 or so performances the show has racked up since it opened on…
In 1964, when I was five years old, my father told me that Patty Duke didn’t have a twin. Naturally I recognized this information for what it was: a bald-faced lie. Every week on The Patty Duke Show anyone could see there were two teenage girls, not one actress and…
Twelve years ago Lily Tomlin opened her mouth and launched a thousand monologues. The 1986 Broadway success of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe spawned a generation of self-styled storytellers, from the cutthroat visionary portraits of Eric Bogosian and the neurotic ramblings of Spalding Gray to…
Music, as a theater insider once put it, is the food of love. Opera, on the other hand, is a series of naughty sexual escapades, repeatedly slammed doors, and horny bellhops. At least, those are the elements that drive Lend Me a Tenor, Ken Ludwig’s 1989 Tony Award-winning farce about…
Of all the things your mother specifically told you not to do — talk with your mouth full, go out with married men — chances are she didn’t mention the following: running off into the snow in your wedding dress. But if you did happen to desert your fiance at…
Of all the people you might encounter in a solo drama, John Hinckley is not likely to be anyone’s first choice. Chances are the would-be Reagan assassin won’t be serving tea in the cozy manner of Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst or experiencing high-volume sexual liberation along the…
Creating theater frequently involves assembling miracles in small spaces. Extremely small spaces, if you happen to be the Florida Playwrights’ Theatre (FPT), which is mounting its Fifth Annual Shakespeare Festival in its postage-stamp Hollywood storefront venue. Squeezing Hamlet and The Tempest — Shakespeare’s most popular play and his most magical…
There’s a moose in the guest bedroom in Michael McKeever’s new comedy 37 Postcards. The animal never makes an appearance onstage (a taxidermist crossed its path long before the play begins), but it does take part in the events that unfold when Avery Sutton, a young man newly returned from…
Actor Peter Haig embraces his role as Vincent Vincent, the pivotal character in the British farce Natural Causes, as though he were gorging on the theatrical equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner. Making his way through each savory episode, Haig samples multiple comic possibilities, devouring each morsel served up by playwright Eric…
Hollywood is openly neurotic about its hatred of psychotherapy. Witness, most recently, Barbra Streisand’s ridiculous Dr. Susan Lowenstein in The Prince of Tides who aggressively mischaracterizes the entire profession with each flick of her nails. In the theater, however, obnoxious psychotherapists tend to appear when a playwright is trying to…
Simpatico may be the funniest play about losers in Sam Shepard’s entire prolific output. Long before we meet them, these characters have lost the loves of their lives, aged without grace, and in some cases suffered devastating reversals of fortune. In the course of the play, some suffer even more…
Summer theater is the sort of oxymoron that conjures up sarcastic epithets such as “dramatic hot dog stand,” to use the term coined by George Jean Nathan, the esteemed late American theater critic. Or “straw-hat trail,” the term used by others to denote the sartorial choices of the supposed morons…
The most startling scene in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde — having its Florida premiere at the Caldwell Theatre Company in Boca Raton — opens the second act. It’s set on the stage of a twentieth-century talk show on which a fatuous TV host and a self-important…
In his five-decade career, Cole Porter wrote songs for Fanny Brice, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and Bert Lahr, just to name a few. One measure of his virtuosity as a composer, however, is that no one singer really owns a Porter tune. Not even Frank Sinatra,…
Milton Berle isn’t actually backstage at The Last Supper, but his voice is, if only on Memorex. The Borscht Belt comedian has loaned his name and endorsement to Artie Butler’s hapless but ambitious new musical about a hapless but ambitious guy trying to sell a musical comedy to a Broadway…
Since there aren’t many coming-out stories about lesbians in Hoboken, New Jersey, it’s easy to imagine why the folks at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville sat up and took notice in 1994 when Wendy Hammond sent in the script for Julie Johnson. What made them choose…
There’s only one genuinely dramatic moment in Cloud Tectonics, but, boy, is it a doozy. A man leaves a room and re-enters it moments later. His clothes are different. He’s carrying letters written while he was away. To him, two years have unfolded in the interim. To the characters on-stage…
Imagine country-western heartthrob Clint Black inhabiting the body of Wagner’s romantic hero Siegfried and you’ll get the spirit of Das Barbecu, the Hee Haw-inspired adaptation of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Yes, that particular Ring cycle. It’s the same nineteenth-century opera series (Die Gotterdammerung, Das Rheingold, Siegfried, and Die Walkurie) that retells…
By June 28, the end of its third season, City Theatre’s Summer Shorts festival will have put on 48 new plays on its main stage, about three times the number of productions from your average professional company. In fact, as you read this, fifteen premieres of black-out sketches, comic monologues,…
