Greg Kerestan - Page 2

If any company in the area can be said to have a formula for its seasons, that is a fair assessment of Saint Vincent Summer Theatre's usual years: a farce, a revue of pre-rock songs from stage and screen, and then a Roger Bean style nostalgic jukebox musical.

If you don't know the capsule plot of Back to the Future yet, close this review and go pull it up for streaming, or check TBS (Back to the Future is almost always running on TBS these days).

Marya Sea Kaminski ends her tenure at the Public with her most ambitious and open-hearted production yet

It's an oldie but a goodie, and Saint Vincent knows farce like nobody else.

I'm a millennial, and a nerd. Of course I love Avenue Q. It reminds me of seventh through ninth grade, when the nascent internet first started spreading clips of the music from this 'raunchy puppet show on Broadway.'

This new musical makes a case both for its own mainstream success and for its heroine as an under-appreciated icon.

Pittsburgh's most reliable indie company scores again with a little-seen concept musical.

It's a wonder Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder film, has held up as well as it does without seeming totally creaky and outdated. This is, after all, a 1959 Hollywood comedy, albeit one that is remarkably fluid in its attitudes towards both gender and sexuality.

Is Jesus the hero of Jesus Christ Superstar? It's a question people have debated for years, first spurred by lyricist Tim Rice quipping (possibly sarcastically) in the early seventies that Christ was the villain of the piece, not the hero. The brilliance of the piece is in its almost ambivalent reportage: we see one week in the titular messiah's life, with a just-the-facts approach that never editorializes per se.

The first thing I noticed in the theatre at City Theatre's Birthday Candles was the set. I'm a longtime lover of thrift shops, junk shops and the maximalist 'detail everywhere' aesthetic of the Disney Imagineers. My companion for the night and I spent the preshow prying the set apart with our eyes (does that E mean anything? is that a flute or a clarinet in the box up there? hey, what's that in the corner there that I can't quite make out?), unaware that nearly every item in that montage would soon have a deeper meaning.

One of the oddest dramedies in recent history is also one of the most satisfyingly heartfelt.

It's a very good play about a very bad play. That's the capsule version of what you'll see at Justin Emeka's production of Alice Childress's once-controversial Trouble in Mind. Though written in 1955, the mix of seriousness and satire in the piece feels shockingly contemporary, both in terms of its subject matter and in terms of its tone and structure.

Frank Wildhorn's Jekyll & Hyde has long been a divisive show among theatre fans. Is it a worthy follow-up to the other literary-based megamusicals of the eighties and nineties, like Les Miserables, Martin Guerre and Miss Saigon? Or is it a trashy, boneheaded knockoff of Sweeney Todd with more power ballads and sexy dancing girls?

Remember Jones is funny, but he isn't a joke. There's a knowing kitsch value to the cabaret artist turned rock revue revivalist's stage presence: he looks like Elton John, dresses like Liberace and sings like Joe Cocker, on a stage full of bandstands and matching-jacketed musicians. But this isn't a parody of a Vegas show. What Jones and company are doing is a lot more daring than parody: a genuine revival of that sort of big-band rock showmanship for the neo-soul era. And it works.

In some ways, Lolita Chakrabarti's Life of Pi, adapted from the novel by Yann Martel and directed by Max Webster, can feel like a grown-up version of the puppet-heavy visual multimedia spectacles often seen in high-end children's theatre.

It has long been posited that Sherlock Holmes is difficult to adapt well, because the nature of Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Universe' is so fragmented. Most of his memorable characters apppear only once and rarely interact; even more vexing, Holmes's own behaviors vary from the misanthropic and cold to the joyful and gregarious. How, then, does one construct the ultimate Sherlock Holmes story?

CLO's seasonal favorites may not be new, but they have yet to wear out their welcome.