Greg Kerestan - Page 2

Michael Frayn's legendary farce returns, in the Public's most go-for-broke physical comedy yet.

Here's a fun fact about me: I have never played one of the Four Plaids, but I have been in many, many productions of Forever Plaid. There used to be a drawer in my house full of printed-out certificates and plaid-covered dental floss, tokens of my repeat apearances as the 'special audience volunteer' in productions of Forever Plaid across the last twenty years.

When it comes to Stephen Sondheim, people often have very strong opinions on 'blue-book Sondheim' (the first half of his memoirs is a blue book covering his origins through Merrily) versus 'pink book Sondhiem' (the second half, a pink book, covers Sunday through Bounce).

If you saw Very Berry Dead at Big Storm last year (and I hope you did), you probably had some idea what to expect with actor/writer José Pérez IV's latest show, To Battle. You'd be right, but you'd also be wrong. Both shows blend absurdism and realism, comedy and drama, and tease out revelations that contextualize everything until the last minute.

One of the biggest debates in the world of theatre is over the genre of Anton Chekhov's masterpiece of early modernism, The Seagull. It's been almost universally acknowledged as a tragedy... except by Chekhov himself, who intended it as a comedy.

A refreshingly non-replica production design breathes new life into the sometimes-overexposed property.aOne of the fascinating things about modern musicals is also one of the most frustrating: we are experiencing them as what Richard Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Stripped-down production values but a game cast make the Pythonesque musical fly. There used to be a blog called 'Low Budget Beasts,' which eventually evolved to 'Low Budget Shreks.' Like the title implies, it was a site full of photos mocking community and small professional theatres for staging productions of tech-heavy musicals without the money and supplies to do them right.

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.