Ann Lemons Pollack
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Angels in America, Part One: The Millennium Approaches
Angels in America came to Broadway in 1993. This year, Hana Sharif, the new artistic director of the Rep, has chosen it to introduce herself to St. Louis. Tony Kushner’s Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play is one with with a strong emotional weight to it over the years. But how has it aged? Is
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New Mexico: On the Road, part 1
It’s taken me decades to get back to New Mexico. I was there briefly as a young teenager – first trip without the parents!! – and always wanted more time than a few hours in places like Taos, Santa Fe and what I learned was called the High Road between the two cities. This year,
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Shakespeare in Love
It’s all hands on deck for Insight Theatre Company’s production of Shakespeare in Love. The cast of 24 includes many faces familiar to regular theater-goers; I suspect this may have something to do with the actors’ eagerness to try their hand at the adaptation of the 1998 award-winning film of the same name. Their efforts
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Antigone: Requiem per Patriarchus
Do you know what a gnu looks like? It’s one of several animals described as “looking like it was made by a committee”. SATE/ERA’s Antigone: Requiem per Patriarchus escapes that problem, despite being a production of the classic that’s gone through several layers of the creation process. It began as a playwriting project at the
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Guys and Dolls
If ever there were an example of how a show, particularly a musical, is a jigsaw puzzle, it’s Stray Dog Theatre’s Guys and Dolls. The delicious score by Frank Loesser is a perfect example of American musical comedy, and Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows’ book, inspired by Damon Runyon, is full of funny. It’s great
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Matilda
This may have been the best Muny season in the 25 years I’ve been going regularly. Admittedly, I missed Cinderella and Footloose this year, but overall it’s been a delight, starting with a bang with Guys and Dolls and wrapping up their 101st season with Matilda, a remarkable evening’s experience. It beggars journalistic tradition, perhaps,
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Assisted Living: The Musical
Assisted Living: The Musical, now at the Playhouse At Westport Plaza, is more fun than you might expect. Yes, some of the jokes are tasteless, a few of those qualifying as what I (retired RN) call “nurse humor”. Many more are downright bawdy, but somehow it’s no chore to go with the flow that Rick
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Paint Your Wagon
Forget Lee Marvin. And forget Clint Eastwood – in fact, please forget Clint Eastwood. Paint Your Wagon, currently at the Muny, is nowhere near what the 1969 movie version forced upon us. It’s far more dazzling and sounds far more professional. The show began as a 1951 Lerner and Loewe Broadway musical, before they had
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1776
Before there was Hamilton, there was 1776. Who’d have thought a musical about how the Declaration of Independence might work? That was Sherman Edwards, who worked his way through NYU as a jazz pianist. There were a few years of teaching high school history while he pulled together his career as a backup musician and
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Indecent
Indecent is a beautiful, heavy-going drama. Paula Vogel’s play, she of How I Learned to Drive and The Baltimore Waltz, among other works, tackles censorship, homophobia and antisemitism in an utterly seductive manner. It’s themes are serious-to-downright-grim, but it’s mesmerizing. The Max and Louie production of it at the Grandel gives it all they’ve got