Ann Lemons Pollack

  • Coming on Monday: The Every 28 Hours Plays

    Just a reminder that The Every 28 Hours Plays will have what seems to be its final appearance in St. Louis Monday night. Developed in conjunction with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it’s a series of one-minute plays from many authors. It was created in the aftermath of Ferguson. This October, the plays are being staged

    read more

  • Road Trip: Hanover, NH, Boston and Manchester, PA

    A recent road trip of five cities in 9 days brought some good food in fairly widely scattered locations. I hadn’t left home intending to write, so there are no pictures – and you should be glad because most of these places turned out to be PRETTY DARK. But the tastes – ah, that’s another

    read more

  • Golda’s Balcony

    Random clusters occur in theater, just like they do everywhere else. September turned out to be one of those periods when we got great theater after great theater here in town. We seem to have another one going on now: Political theater. Golda’s Balcony, now at the New Jewish Theatre, is such a play, this

    read more

  • Until the Flood

    It isn’t just our area that needs to have a dialogue about race. I suspect most of the world does, but we have to start where we are, particularly in America. The Repertory Theatre St. Louis, after the events in Ferguson in 2014, decided to commission a piece on what artistic director Steven Woolf terms

    read more

  • Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show

    Once more: Let’s do the time warp again. Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show is on the boards at Stray Dog Theatre. To my knowledge, this is the first time a theater program in St. Louis has admonished audience members not to squirt anything. Artistic director Gary Bell, in his pre-show announcements, also asks the

    read more

  • Pumpkin Pudding

    Here’s the pumpkin pudding recipe from Larry Forgione that I wrote about in a story about An American Place. I’ve gotten a couple of requests for it. This is part of a dinner menu I haul out when I’m feeding people whose palates are conservative. (A nice soup to start, then roast chicken and a

    read more

  • Suspended

    Unless you’ve been living in a bubble the last few years, you know that immigration and immigrants are a hot – and hot-button – topic. Upstream Theater’s first offering of this season is Suspended, by Maya Arad Yasur. It looks at two immigrants who have fled their nameless homeland as it descended into terror. Benjamin

    read more

  • Just One Bite: The Scottish Arms

    I’m a sucker for nachos, even the ones with ersatz cheese pumped out of a steel cask. But I don’t often order them in restaurants, preferring to graze on items less frequently seen hereabouts. And an order of them, unless it’s shared with several people, is just too filling to allow for enjoying the following

    read more

  • Flashback: An American Place

    A shooting star? A brilliant flash, then moving across the heavens, then gone? That might describe An American Place, the restaurant that Larry Forgione, who, more than once, was described as the "godfather of American cuisine",  opened in the old Statler hotel downtown. Forgione was an amiable guy, at least to those of us in

    read more

  • Dixon’s Smoke Company

    Does St. Louis need another barbecue place? Pish tosh. That’s like asking if we need another hamburger spot. Barbecue is a birthright, especially in this part of the United States. We can put that argument out of the way right now. And so we have Dixon's Smoke Company, very old school in some ways –

    read more