Theater/Film Reviews
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The Women of Lockerbie
There is easy theatre – big happy musicals, carefully drawn comedies, those shows people hear about and decide to go see at some large, well-known place with numerous parking spaces. And then there’s the other kind. The longer I go to theatre, the more I find myself looking forward to plays I haven’t ever seen.
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Feeding Beatrice
Our Halloween present from the Rep arrived a day late. Feeding Beatrice opened November 1 in the Studio Theatre, giving us a world premiere from Kirsten Greenidge, the playwright whose work Milk Like Sugar was done by the Black Rep earlier this year. It’s a self-described Gothic tale, although it’s surely the only one of
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The Who’s Tommy
I’m not sure just how it was that I never saw The Who’s Tommy until Stray Dog Theatre’s current production. So I came in as a neophyte, especially since I really wasn’t a fan of The Who back in the day. The show is a fantasy that lends itself to lots of variations and interpretations.
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Brighton Beach Memoirs
Even the worst of people are not totally useless, as the wag said, they can always serve as a bad example. It’s true of families, as well, n.b., Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. Simon’s quasi-autobiographical play is the story of the adolescent Eugene Jerome and his life in Brooklyn in the time just before America
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Equivocation
A fast tip of the cap to West End Players Guild’s Equivocation, which I was able to see only very close to the end of the run – at this writing, there’s one more show, the afternoon of October 6. It’s a work of speculation, based on what might have happened had Robert Cecil (the
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Cry-Baby
At a time when the world around us is, if not in flames, then beginning to emit worrisome odors and was that smoke?, there’s Cry-Baby. New Line Theatre has brought it back after they staged the very first regional production in 2012. It’s a John Waters work from his film of the same name, and
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The Agitators
The Agitators, currently on the boards from Upstream Theatre, was almost surely named to stir interest and opinion and possibly even prejudice from its potential audiences. It’s a story about the relationship between Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. Frederick Douglass (?1818-1895), to refresh the memory of anyone who might be unaware after a recent
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Whammy!
Young Liars has done it again. Literally. They’ve resurrected their 2010 production of their own work Whammy!, subtitled The Seven Secrets to a Sane Self. If you’re not familiar with Young Liars’ work, it’s performance art, so don’t expect, for instance, a plot line or standard song-and-dance. Whammy! is, theoretically, based on self-help books, but
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Fifty Words
Adam opens a bottle of sparkling wine to mark a night for him and his wife Jan without their 8-year-old son, who’s doing his first sleepover. Jan dutifully takes a tiny, tiny sip and within a few minutes asks for some white wine. A behavioral cue, indeed. Can This Marriage Be Saved, as the old