Theater/Film Reviews
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The Wild Party
Poems only occasionally are inspirations for musical theater, and it took a long time for this one to reach fruition, but "The Wild Party," based on a 1928 poem–and a decade of Prohibition-driven parties–arrived in St. Louis last night to run through May 15. The production by New Line Theatre will run through May 15
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Country Girl
"The Country Girl" is over-the-top theater. There are three great roles for actors who are willing to let it all hang out and able to retain control. It's high drama, even melodrama at times, but the Clifford Odets play gets an almost-terrific production from the Avalon Theatre Company, it should shed the "almost" by
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Ajami
Ajami is a neighborhood in the Israeli city of Jaffa, practically next door to Tel Aviv, though its population is mostly Arab. It's a rowdy, seedy, rough neighborhood, like those all over the world that provide a familiar setting for violent books and movies. Ajami, almost a slum, has all the usual characters. Poverty is
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Gogol Bordello Non Stop
Whether it's "gypsy punk," as founder and front man Eugene Hutz says, or any other music- and band-based movie, it boils down to an inescapable truth: If you like the group and its sound, you'll like the movie, if it's "Gogol Bordello Non Stop," at Webster University's Moore Auditorium through Sunday, or anything else. If
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Terribly Happy
The depths of irony and black humor are obvious companions for whoever named this bleak Danish story "Terribly Happy," but that's for someone else to judge. Excellently acted and with a slow, stately, tension-building pace, we follow Robert, a Copenhagen policeman exiled to the small and lonely town of Skarilld for reasons that never are
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Romeo and Juliet
Given that a feud between their families is what turns "Romeo and Juliet" into a tragedy, it's a standard playwright's device to put the characters into a different time frame. So Leonard Bernstein turned them into rival New York gangs. And the Black Rep did it a few months ago in a city like St.
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The Joneses
There's an interesting opening sequence in "The Joneses," an imaginative touch that carries product placement to new heights. A moving van tools into a very fancy suburb, parks in front of an equally fancy house. A team of movers unloads the truck and starts arranging furniture according to a very detailed plan. A truck carries
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Vincere
He was definitely a junior partner in his relationship with Adolf Hitler, but Benito Mussolini was a major player in the rise of fascism and the history of the time between the wars that defined the first half of the 20th century. "Vincere," (to win) shines some light on the dictator's earlier years. Some excellent
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Outlying Islands
The outlying islands off the Scottish coast, in both the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, are those which do not make up part of larger groups. They have names like Sula Sgeir and Innis Mhor and hardly any support a human population. They are isolated and desolate. They make excellent locations for plays because
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A Doll’s House
Few plays ever deserved the accolade of "groundbreaking" like "A Doll's House," written in 1879 and still powerful enough to draw gasps from the audience at the Gaslight Theatre, where a powerful production by the St. Louis Actors Studio opened last night to run through Aprl 25. Henrik Ibsen's classic tale of Torvald Helmer