“Every woman has a one-woman show in her,” says Oprah Winfrey in a recent issue of her mothership magazine, O.
Like the directions to Oz that the Scarecrow offers Dorothy during their first encounter in the cornfield, there are two ways to go when approaching a stage production of “The Wizard of Oz.”
The recently released “The Lion King” film – with its computer-generated herds of zebras, elephants and antelope, its virtual Serengeti and its turbocharged skyscapes – has been universally praised for its remarkable photorealism.
Is there a better time than now to escape to Meredith Willson’s musical comedy safe-haven of River City, Iowa in 1912? And is there a better place to do it than at the Porthouse amphitheater, summer home of the Equity actor-enhanced productions of Kent State University’s musical theater program?
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 populated…
An Israeli comedy troupe called Davai just made its U.S. premiere at Cleveland’s inaugural BorderLight International Theatre + Fringe Festival. And it did so with a remarkable, 90-minute slice of absurdist, non-verbal storytelling and masterful clownery that lives up to the “fringe” in the f…
I used to have a crush on Jesse Tuck, the immortal boy in the novel “Tuck Everlasting.”
none too fragile theatre recently moved to the former Coach House theatre at 732 W. Exchange St. in Akron.
Although I adore Roald Dahl’s darkly satirical children’s book, “Matilda,” I am not a fan of Dennis Kelly’s musical adaptation. And yet there is much to love about the Beck Center for the Arts’ production of it.
Be warned: There most certainly will be hugging among strangers at Playhouse Square. And random acts of kindness will likely break out as well.
Three things become abundantly clear while watching Mercury Theater Company’s production of “Chaplin,” the 2012 bio-musical about the creator of the Tramp and his epic rise and dramatic fall in silent film-era Hollywood.
In Noël Coward’s 1930 comedy of manners “Private Lives,” music plays a crucial role when the brilliant dialogue cannot carry all the emotional weight of the storytelling. So much so that one of the characters casually remarks: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”
Shakespeare believed that all the world’s a stage, but only Edinburgh, Adelaide, Prague and a dozen or so other world cities offer international theater and fringe festivals. Add Cleveland to that list.
Earlier this year, there was an utterly charmless revival of “Man of La Mancha” in London’s West End that was set in modern day surroundings and featured in the title role an unpersuasive actor — Kelsey Grammer — who is famous for things other than musical theater.
Epic. That’s how the $10 million musical “Ragtime” was promoted and critiqued when it arrived on Broadway in 1998.
The sobbing you hear underscoring the production of “Dear Evan Hansen” – currently on tour and on stage at Playhouse Square after being recognized as the best musical on Broadway in 2017 – is coming from both sides of the proscenium. It is the sound of actors lost in their astoundingly hones…
The question to ask theatergoers these days is not “have you seen ‘Mamma Mia!,” but “how many times?”
In 1949, love was legislated in South Africa.
“Nothing will come of nothing,” says Lear, the elderly king of England, when his favorite daughter refuses to dote on him the way her opportunistic, two-faced older sisters do. And so, upon the honorable but undemonstrative Cordelia’s disinheritance and exile, Lear’s great tragedy – triggere…
Imagine if Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s political satire “Threepenny Opera,” where the characters make life decisions based solely on the desire for material things, was about the Ohio real estate industry. Then picture this play-with-music living inside the grotesque world of a Hieronymu…
