Wednesday, July 23, 2025
By SCOTTY BENNETT Storytellers are artists who use a palette of verbal and physical effects to paint, in sound and motion, the picture the wordsmith creates in words on a page. David Dean Bo…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:56AMBy ALAN SMASON This season’s New Orleans Shakespeare Festival has been quite unusual. To begin with, the first of its two major productions wasn’t even Shakespeare: it was Moliére and h…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:15AMMonday, July 21, 2025
By LOU HARRY There are expectations that come when a play explicitly centers on death – particularly a play with a doom-and-gloom title such as the one attached to Noah Diaz’s play You W…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 09:37AMSaturday, July 19, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Julie Benko turned in a perfect performance as Eliza Doolittle in a concert version of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady opposit…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:14PMBy ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) It’s taken ten years for the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans (TWTC) to unveil its first production of Tennes…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 03:28PMMonday, July 14, 2025
By LOU HARRY After a few days at the Stratford Festival, I stopped in at the Shaw Festival for the first time in a dozen years. Visiting the festival and the charming town made me regret tho…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 10:27AMSaturday, July 12, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) When Company by Stephen Sondheim (and a book by Mark Furth) opened on Broadway in 1970 it was such a breath of fresh air and so …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:51PMWednesday, July 9, 2025
By LOU HARRY You don’t need to go to an amusement park to have the feeling of riding a roller coaster. In Stratford, Ontario, you can acquire something akin to whiplash at a festival where…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:34PMBy SCOTTY BENNETT A famous line from the John Ford film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is spoken by the newspaper reporter character, Maxwell Scott, near the end of the film, after h…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:16PMMonday, July 7, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) In Pirates! The Penzance Musical, Rupert Holmes proves he knows how to take a popular hit, re-set it in an improbable location…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 09:04AMSaturday, July 5, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) There are times when a local production company attempts to put on a treasured musical theatre piece and it collapses under the …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:14PMMonday, June 30, 2025
By ROY BERKO Like the old tale, my lord: “it is not so, nor `t was not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so.” The intimate Beck’s Studio Theatre is a perfect venue for meeting a…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:59AMBy: SCOTTY BENNETT A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First is a gem of a play written, directed, and performed by Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland. This two-hander makes …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:35AMSaturday, June 28, 2025
By SCOTTY BENNETT One of the most famous opening lines of a novel is “Call me Ishmael.” It is from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a book many people are aware of but have never read. It …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 11:12AMSaturday, June 21, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Chicago –the longest running show now on Broadway and the second longest running show in history – made its way to the Saeng…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:28AMTuesday, June 17, 2025
˘By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) Fats Waller, the very talented American singer and songwriter, lived an unfortunately short but prolific life, dying in 1943 a…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:09AMMonday, June 16, 2025
EDWARD RUBIN, an iconoclastic theatre critic, arts critic and curator, who wrote for decades about theatre and the visual arts, died after a protracted battle with bladder cancer at Calvary …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:14PMMonday, June 9, 2025
The 2025 Tony Award winners were announced in ceremonies at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 8, hosted by Tony Award winner Cynthia Errivo. Maybe Happy Ending, a musical set in the futu…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 10:47AMTuesday, June 3, 2025
By LOU HARRY I caught the first performance of The Prom, produced by Summer Stock Stage, a unique company that fuses the talents of established performers with early career actors. It’s no…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 09:31AMSunday, June 1, 2025
By LOU HARRY I caught the opening night of Terry Guest’s play Oak at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Center, the second of its three rolling world premiere productions. Some thoughts: – Oak…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 08:59PMFriday, May 30, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) A decade ago the NOLA Project mounted an unusual production of Adam Szymkowicz’s Clown Bar at The Little Gem Saloon. Set in a …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 08:51PMWednesday, May 21, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) Over the course of the last several years, Crescent City Stage has established itself as the premiere equity theatre company in …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 12:31PMTuesday, May 13, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick, the two brothers who conceived Something Rotten! and more recently wrote the music and lyrics for t…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:35AMTuesday, May 6, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable is a brilliant indictment of organized religion and the negativity attached to innuend…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 12:52AMThursday, May 1, 2025
The 2025 Tony Award nominations were announced on Thursday, May 1 by Tony Award winners Sarah Paulson and Wendell Pierce. The nominations for competitive Tony Awards are: Best Play English,�…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 02:35PMMonday, April 14, 2025
By ROY BERKO Hispanic theatre is noted for its’ fictional-based literature that normally has six elements: character, plot, point of view, setting, style and theme. These are often encased…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 05:20PMSaturday, April 12, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) It’s been a full decade since Lin-Manuel Miranda’s idea of a “mixtape” about the Founding Fathers was playing at the Pub…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 02:48PMThursday, April 3, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) When the season announcement was made last year that Jefferson Performing Arts (JPA) would be producing Billy Elliot: The Musica…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:59AMSunday, March 30, 2025
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) Throughout his life, Tennessee Williams knew tragedy. Whether through his sister Rose’s struggle with mental health or the los…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 01:04AMSaturday, March 29, 2025
By SCOTTY BENNETT There are times in a person’s life when the only rational response to the pressures of daily living is to escape into a different reality. Drugs and alcohol are often the…
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 11:09AMBy SCOTTY BENNETT In the moments between daylight and evening, there is a time when it is neither day nor night. It is a time of transition, a liminal state between now and then, a twilight …
SOURCE: Theatre Criticsm at 06:45AM 
