While their musical “Fiddler on the Roof” was running on Broadway in 1964, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock were creating another show about another Jewish family facing oppression. But while “Tevye’s people were resigned to their poverty, the Rothschilds were determined to c…

Thirty years ago, the Cleveland International Film Festival experienced a major turning point when its board voted to move its screenings from the east side’s Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights – where it had resided for the festival’s first 14 years – to downtown as part of the Clevelan…

More often than not, classic thrillers come across as glass-encased museum pieces to today’s theater audiences, what with their arthritic wordplay, creaky plot twists and archaically excessive exposition spouted by dusty archetypical characters. They are more exhibition than entertainment.

“I hate theatre,” says a frumpy, effeminate middle-aged man (Jonathan Kronenberger) from his comfy center stage chair at the start of this play. He is talking directly to the audience that has gathered at French Creek Theatre, adding that he particularly hates plays that break the fourth wall.

As they did with “Chicago” and “Cabaret,” composer/lyricists John Kander and Fred Ebb manage to combine social consciousness and moral indignation with high entertainment in “The Scottsboro Boys,” currently on stage at the Beck Center for the Arts.

I could go on and on about the coincidental yet serendipitous timing of a pro-tsarist musical being staged on the heels of President Trump’s State of the Union address and impeachment acquittal.

Playwright and lyricist Brian Yorkey and composer Tom Kitt have turned self-reflective self-disclosure into a musical theater art form of sorts, first with their 2008 Tony Award-winning “Next to Normal” – a dark and vivid portrait of manic-depression – and later, in 2014, with “If/Then,” whi…