The question is not whether the national tour of “Jersey Boys,” currently on stage at Playhouse Square, is good.

French playwright Gérald Sibleyras’ “Le Vent Des Peupliers,” which has been translated into English by British playwright Tom Stoppard and retitled “Heroes,” is a modest work affectionately referred to as a “boulevard comedy.” Like a boulevard, it is broad in terms of its humor, well-manicur…

The Mentalist. The Trickster. The Daredevil. The Elusive. The Manipulator. The Showman. The Transformationalists.

One may not recognize Deb Filler when she takes the Mandel Jewish Community Center’s Stonehill Auditorium stage in Beachwood on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m. with her show, “I Did It My Way in Yiddish (In English).”

One of the darkest moments in the Cleveland arts scene was when the Cleveland Ballet, which was founded in 1972 by Dennis Nahat and Ian Horvath, established a co-venture in San Jose, Calif., in 1986 and then relocated there in 2000.

The casting call for the role of Tiny Tim in this year’s London and Broadway revivals of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” read: “Applicants without a disability will not be considered.”

Every year, local professional theater companies devote themselves to putting on the best shows possible. Although some companies have deeper pockets, more Actors’ Equity contracts or a grander facility than others, talent makes itself known and creativity always rises to the surface no matt…

“Constellations” is a typical one-act boy-meets-girl play by British dramatist Nick Payne that debuted in London in 2012 and ran on Broadway in 2015. But here, the boy meets the girl again and again and again in 65 scenes across 68 minutes.

Some modern musicals stab at your heart (“Come From Away”), punch you in the gut (“Next to Normal”) or stimulate your brain (“Hamilton”). “Mean Girls” activates the gag reflex at the back of your throat. But in a good way.

If you share my theater sensibilities, you probably love the Peter Pan prequel “Peter and the Starcatcher” – a wonderfully witty and meta-theatrical show on a stripped-down stage that turns everyday objects into storytelling stagecraft – but wished it had more heart. And you most likely ador…

When we reflect back on a live theater production, it is often a specific moment that we recall – an instant when a playwright’s idea, a director or designer’s vision, and/or an actor’s performance surpasses an audience’s expectations and something special happens.

It is generally agreed that no creative work by or about Jews has won the hearts of Americans as thoroughly as “Fiddler on the Roof.”  The musical is a Yiddish-to-English adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s 19th century stories about the dairyman Tevye, his family and the other Jews who populate…

“Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.” “Mean Girls.” “Anastasia.” “Disney's Frozen.”

There are no heroes in Joel Drake Johnson’s divisive water cooler dramedy “Rasheeda Speaking,” which was first seen in Chicago in 2013 and first performed at Karamu in 2016. Here, office politics turn toxic and everyone is a slow-leak source.

Margaret Atwood’s book “The Handmaid's Tale,” which was turned into an Emmy Award-winning TV show in 2017, is set in a brutally repressive near-future patriarchy formerly known as the United States. There, young women referred to as Handmaids are stripped of their names, identities and right…

With poor, young African-American, Native American, and Latinx students being suspended and expelled from school more frequently than their middle-class white counterparts, often resulting in disenfranchisement and criminalization, it is little wonder that playwrights have been calling for s…

In 2004 in the New York Times, theater critic Charles Isherwood raved over Will Eno’s one-man monologue “Thom Pain (based on nothing),” calling the caustic and comedic Pulitzer-finalist play “stand-up existentialism.”

“The Band’s Visit,” which is on tour and at Cleveland’s Playhouse Square from Nov. 5 to 24, was adapted from a 2007 Israeli film of the same name and premiered in an award-winning 2016 off-Broadway production before its transfer to New York City’s W. 47th St. the following year.

In the recent film “The Martian” starring Matt Damon, astronaut Mark Watney is left for dead on the surface of Mars, but he is very much alive. While salvaging through the things his colleagues left behind in order to assess his resources for survival, he comes to realize that his only sourc…

You are what you reap.