“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 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 source of mu…
You are what you reap.
The downside of repertory productions at Great Lakes Theater is half-expecting the angry mob in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” who alternately perform in Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man” on the same stage, to break into a roaring rendition of “Shipoopi” during Mark Antony’s proclamation of…
There’s something interesting taking place at the Beck Center for the Arts, but it is not what's on stage during “The Member of the Wedding.”
One of life’s lessons is that things don’t always end well for those who talk with angels.
Not long after the fifth revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” closed on Broadway in 2015, its producers decided to recast the show with non-union actors and send it on a national tour to 32 cities.
George Brant’s “Into the Breeches!” does what good comedies do – offer sugar-dusted social commentary that, in its current Cleveland Play House staging, finds audiences laughing uproariously through the tears during the performance and lost in thought while heading for the exits afterward.
Max Lewkowicz and Valerie Thomas’ 2019 documentary “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles,” which was released in August, opens Sept. 20 at Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights. It offers an always engaging, markedly insightful and highly entertaining origin story behind one of Broadway’s most be…
David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Glengarry Glen Ross,” on stage at the Beck Center for the Arts, is a most intriguing play. For it possesses no characters we care about yet results in a production we are glued to.
Shakespeare’s tragic “Romeo and Juliet” has proven itself to be a particularly pliable and resilient piece of work.
In his poetic play “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” Irish playwright Eugene O'Neill stated that “there is no present or future – only the past, happening over and over again – now.” Compatriot wordsmith Marina Carr took this sentiment to heart when writing “By the Bog of Cats.”
Perhaps it’s the deep, elusive and haunting quality of Anton Chekhov’s 19th century plays – where what appears at first glance to be deceptively simple reveals something ominous just beneath the surface – that has inspired so many contemporary retellings.
Kenneth Lonergan’s scripts for the stage and the screen (in 2017, he won an Oscar for “Manchester by the Sea”) are character studies – tightly focused meditations about small people who live their small lives in a minor key and are tormented by inner conflict.
