Theater/Film Reviews
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Never the Sinner
Murder most foul, indeed. Two rich kids from Chicago decide to kill someone to exhibit their immense intelligence and overall superiority. Not a story from a novel, although it’s been novelized. It’s the Leopold and Loeb case from 1924. Never the Sinner, which opened this past weekend at the New Jewish Theatre, focuses as much
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Million Dollar Quartet
There’s not much of a plot to Million Dollar Quartet, now at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. That’s about the worst thing anyone could accuse the show of. Having gotten that out of the way, let us just say straightaway, this is the feel-good show of the year so far. It’s about the music
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The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron
Big theaters are fine things. Lots of people get to enjoy spectacles, the dancing, the costumes, the sets, the orchestras. But if you’ve ever missed, consciously or not, intimacy, consider this. The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron has opened at the Playhouse at Westport Plaza. Robert Dubac, the guy who brought us The Book of Moron a
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The Royale
Please don’t skip seeing the Rep Studio’s The Royale thinking it’s just another sports story. Yes, it’s about a boxer on his way to the top. But it’s beyond that. It does harken back to Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. But it doesn’t feel like a rewrite of Great White Hope. Jay “Sport”
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Zorba
Don’t go expecting Anthony Quinn in Zorba, the current New Line Theatre show. This is the Kander and Ebb musical version, which opened four years after the film Zorba the Greek, in 1968. (Quinn, who did the movie, did, however, star in the 1983 Broadway revival.) It’s a good show for the intimate confines of
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Eating Shakespeare
Our boy Will, that multi-tasking, multipurpose guy, is in on another project. SHAKE 38 will have restaurants involved this year. Just who will be involved will be released in three weeks. But for now, here's some details.
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Carmen
The second of the two performance of Winter Opera St. Louis’ Carmen is Sunday afternoon, March 5 at 3 p.m. It’s particularly approachable in that this is a show whose music has been heard in a hundred places without most of us realizing it was from an opera, so it’s easy to smile at hearing
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The St. Louis Theater Circle Awards 2017
It's getting on to that time again. The annual St. Louis Theater Circle awards are coming up on March 20. Again this year, we're holding it at the Viragh Center at Chaminade College Preparatory School at 425 South LIndbergh between Olive and I-64, a great venue with lots of room. This isn’t just for people
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Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill
There are some musicians whose recordings, no matter how good, how beloved, don’t do them justice. Chief among them, I would argue, is Billie Holiday. If I ever had any doubt of that, they were erased Friday night as Alexis J. Roston sang part of Holiday’s repertoire in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. Holiday,
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Pump Boys and Dinettes
Pump Boys and Dinettes would seem to be about as far as you can get from intellectual theatre. It’s a show with little dialogue and a lot of music about a gas station (they’d say “filling station”) and a diner that calls itself a cafe somewhere in rural North Carolina. But listen to those lyrics.