Tuesday, January 21, 2014
It’s all too common for inept directors and/or actors to turn a really good play into a disappointing theater experience. Think about some of the Shakespeare you’ve …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:22PMSunday, January 12, 2014
It’s still January, right? So…not too late to re-cap last year’s theater-going. In all, I attended 121 productions in 2013, broken down as follows – with bests…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:50PMThursday, November 21, 2013
In the words of a Phoenix Productions insider, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (its official title) is “the kind of show you rush through the book to get to the musi…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:40PMWednesday, November 13, 2013
Once in a while, I’d rather pass on writing about a play I’d intended to review. Sometimes because it’s really bad, which has precluded some reviews, and s…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:04AMTuesday, November 12, 2013
Broadway’s After Midnight ends with “Freeze and Melt,” an ensemble number that mimics that title’s postures. It’s amusing; it’s electric; it’s sensational.…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 12:03AMThursday, November 7, 2013
Until last week, I’d never attended Holmdel Theatre Company while a football game was in progress on the field adjacent to the theater, with the PA announcer and the b…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:53PMWednesday, November 6, 2013
“A Map of the Soul” is comprised of two 80-minute segments, written and performed by Martin Moran. “The Tricky Part” and “All the Rage” are programmed separa…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:08AMMonday, October 28, 2013
Playwright Thornton Wilder did not offer “Our Town” as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village. Rather, he wrote, “it is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smalles…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 09:19PMMonday, October 21, 2013
If the new musical Honeymoon in Vegas, premiering at Paper Mill Playhouse, doesn’t please everybody, it’s not Rob McClure’s fault. The limber, rubbery-…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:42PMTuesday, October 15, 2013
Jack Canfora’s play Jericho premiered in October 2011 at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, New Jersey. With some minor edits and four of its six ro…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:23PMThursday, October 10, 2013
The woman who performs 25 songs in Lady Day, the off-Broadway portrait of legendary jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday, is a terrific singer and, within those songs, a consummate ac…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 12:40PMTuesday, October 1, 2013
It’s not quite Halloween and the spooky house on the New Jersey Repertory Company stage isn’t made of gingerbread, but the old crone who lives there is ri…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:13AMTuesday, September 24, 2013
Reading On Borrowed Time left me feeling that the play creaks, that this representative of the “golden age of the American theatre” is, after 75 years, more than a little stale. C…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 12:49PMFriday, September 20, 2013
First Avenue Playhouse has had a certain amount of success with female-ensemble plays. Four women put their hearts into Crimes of the Heart last year, and the a…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:56AMTuesday, August 27, 2013
Marathon ’33, one of Julie Harris’s ten Best Actress Tony-nominations, opened on Broadway on December 22, 1963. Produced by Actors Studio and written and directed by…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:47PMSaturday, August 17, 2013
The lessons to be taken away from the delightful new Broadway musical First Date, which centers on one of those perilous encounters, include not discussing past dat…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:59PMThursday, August 15, 2013
Because of its literary allusions and contemporary (Elizabethan) poetic forms, Love’s Labour’s Lost has never been among Shakespeare’s most popular plays. In the s…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:45PMTuesday, July 30, 2013
The New Jersey Repertory Company press blurb for Marisa Smith’s Saving Kitty poses the question “What happens when a daughter brings a young man to meet her …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:11AMThursday, July 25, 2013
In his book “A Lifetime with Shakespeare,” Paul Barry, the moving force behind and co-founder (with me) of the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, suggests that des…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:25AMWednesday, July 24, 2013
Clowns do comedy and comics tell comedy, but humorists create comedy. They mine subjects and situations that may not be inherently comical for elements that lend thems…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:56PMThursday, July 18, 2013
It’s hard to come up with a musical that doesn’t revolve around one or two demanding roles and harder still to find people to carry those parts, especially in community theater. Phoeni…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:28PMWednesday, July 10, 2013
Universally recognized for the quality of their namesake’s plays, the (George Bernard) Shaw Festival, in scenic Niagara-on-the-Lake, 20 minutes away from wonder-of-the-world Niagara Fall…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 12:10PM At 61 years and counting, the Stratford Festival remains faithful to Shakespeare, despite dropping his name from their title, after only adding it in 2008. Four of twelve produc…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:54AMFriday, July 5, 2013
In what qualifies as a mini Garden State Noel Coward Festival, Fallen Angels has opened at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in Madison, one week after the supreme British wit’s Pres…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:47PMTuesday, June 11, 2013
Once, when asked how he would be remembered, Noel Coward replied, “By my charm.” Garry Essendine, the leading man in Coward’s well-mannered farce Presen…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:21AMFriday, June 7, 2013
Every once in a while, an off-off-Broadway limited-run showcase production jumps up and reminds you that there is some really good Theatre happening up and down the side stre…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:45PMWednesday, June 5, 2013
One of the four characters in Happy, Robert Caisley’s new play at NJ Rep, ends up happy at the end, but you won’t learn here who it is. In order of appearance, it could be 40-some…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:56PMSunday, May 26, 2013
The American Theatre Wing’s Tony Awards honor theatrical excellence at the Broadway level. Quibble about commercialism or the exclusion of off-Broadway if you will, but the Tony Awa…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:42PMWednesday, May 1, 2013
What do a Romanian mother of a sickly baby, a Nigerian-immigrant cab driver, a foul-mouthed part-time hooker and a middle-aged couple with marriage issues have …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:59AMThursday, April 25, 2013
Q: Which are more heart-warming: the four March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel “Little Women?” or their portrayals in Thomas Hischak’s stage ad…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 12:55PMFriday, May 20, 2011
