In every other interpretation of Tom Wingfield that I have ever seen, Tom is always played to show tenderness and solicitude at times for his mother and sister, and a fundamental understanding of their plight, even as he chafes at their dysfunction and lashes out at them.
Here in Baltimore, it seems to be Bus Stop season.
The Ephrons seem to have set out to make the point that on some profound level, women's clothes are themselves, and that women's very lives are bound up with their clothes and vice versa.
The flaws I've mentioned are real, but are far from detracting altogether from the enjoyment Bus Stop has to offer.
On the evidence of the book, and as echoed in the show, Alice Walker finds permanence and monogamy rarer than more fluid arrangements.
Almost everyone in this world is married or willing to go out on public dates with women to camouflage his real social life.
A show that gets liberal audiences to cheer for someone who at first blush would seem like a future Ann Romney is doing something pretty canny.
For a dark heist play, like a dark heist movie, to work, you need to populate it with hard male actors.
The portrayal of Edna by Lawrence B.
I was intrigued as soon as I heard that Director Eve Muson was bringing the show to a professional company.
The monastery must now meet the demand for an "incorruptible," a corpse that never decomposes, the Rolls-Royce of relics.
The folklore passed on from parents to children under the deceptively superficial name of fairy tales is profound.
In a play in which morally acceptable and unacceptable stances are hopelessly intertwined and might turn an audience off, there are two things that will draw us to the play anyway: Portia and Shylock.
There is anger at the way men perceive women - and abuse, rape, belittle and objectify them.
The songbook of Jerry Leiber (1933-2011) and Mike Stoller (1933- ) is a natural for jukebox musical treatment, because it encompasses such variety that it requires little by way of setting to stay interesting.
A youthful cast, showcasing a number of talents from Morgan State University, brings out Waller's exuberance and his ambivalence.
Rodgers and Hammerstein designed the ending to reduce you to tears, and they knew what they were doing.
As playwright Michael Weller intelligently conveys, except in the most empty marriages, no matter what the parties may have done to each other, there are still ties of love holding them together.
These are small-timers, and what makes their souls as small as their business, I think, is America itself, a place where there is no state religion nor any religion or code of ethics at all which anyone is required to internalize.
