Keith Waits - Page 10

You Can't Have One Without The Other

'Collaboration' has been a watchword for Louisville Ballet Producing and Artistic Director Robert Curran from long before he came to Louisville. Jack Productions, a company Curran co-founded in Melbourne, was grounded in partnerships and collaborations, including with choreographer Lucas Jervies who created the first iteration of Human Abstract with that company.

Down Where its Wetter

For the 3rd year, Arts-Louisville.com and Vault 1031 presented the Arts-Louisville.com/Broadway World Theatre Awards honoring excellence in local theatre. In a ceremony attended by over 100 people, competitive awards in 4 divisions were given out to local theatre companies and individual theatre artists after a public vote administered through the Broadway World website. The period of qualification for these categories was November 1, 2015 and October 31, 2016.

The Folly of the Extraordinary

Silence Speaking Volumes

On a rainy January 19, at 5:30 p.m. on the steps in front of Actors Theatre of Louisville, members of the Louisville theatre community took part in launching a nation-wide initiative entitled The Ghost Light Project. Besides Actors Theatre, there were representatives from other local companies such as Kentucky Shakespeare, Looking for Lilith, The Liminal Playhouse, Theatre [502], the University of Louisville's African American Theatre Program, among others.

Las Mujeres Verdaderas Tienen Curvas (Real Women Have Curves)

The plays of Actors Theatre's annual free Tens festival take on the issues of our day, racial tensions, violence, and police harassment, but weave them amid the promise and angst of new relationships.

Watching the current production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from Kentucky Shakespeare was like seeing it for the first time, it's that fresh and smart. Tom Stoppard's post-modern masterpiece is absurdist and existential; catnip for academics in search of thesis projects concerning mid-Twentieth Century theatre, and director Amy Attaway's production is all of that, but also a deeply satisfying entertainment. You'll laugh a lot while you're in the theatre, and be thinking about the play long after you have left.

If there is a seamy underbelly to Christmas, it is surely the retail hell that is crucial to the profound commercialization of the holiday. And the most ignominious part of that experience must certainly be the rank and file, temporary, seasonal hires in the department stores that rely on the windfall of Christmas to survive. The daily experience was long hours, demanding parents, incontinent children, and distinctly forced and phony jollity.

A Need To Find A Meaning

Playwright Terrance McNally has written some of the best plays and musicals of the last few decades, including Love, Valour, Compassion!and Ragtime. Most of his works have a piece of his life as a member of the LBGTQ community tied within the story. His Mothers and Sons, derived from his 10-minute play Andre's Mother, is firmly planted in themes that still haunt the community to this very day: the AIDS epidemic, equality, sorrow, acceptance, and happiness.

As a character, King Lear is the great aging lion, one of what Charlton Heston called the 'man killers' of Shakespeare, and a play that examines the hubris and arrogance in power held too long. In an unusual collaboration, Commonwealth Theatre Center (CTC) and University of Louisville Theatre Arts are co-producing this production, which mixes faculty and students from both institutions among its cast and crew.

Actors Theatre announced today that their upcoming production of Dominique Morisseau's Detroit '67 will be cancelled, following the unexpected passing of company member Owiso Odera.

Eve Theater Company opens its fifth season with Bathsheba Doran's play Kin. Year five always seems to be a milepost: a time for a company to take stock of itself and others. So I would note that this production seems to represent an important moment of maturity and ambition for Eve. It reaches for a subtlety and emotional range greater than most of their previous efforts. The company's mission of a focus on women led to early productions that featured small groups of women hermetically observed: aging prostitutes on a shared bench, or friends moving through marriage and divorces through the years. Most were casts of only women.

We used to look forward to the summer because it brought Kentucky Shakespeare to the C. Douglas Ramey stage in Central Park, but Producing Artistic Director Matt Wallace has expanded the life of the company to all four seasons. The formal announcement of the 2016-2017 season emphasizes this by actually coming close to the end of the run of its 'first' production.

If you're lucky, the stench of death will hang in the air. When you get out of your car and make your way past the glitzy dance club to the dingy warehouse outback, the stench helps set the scene.

Diana Grisanti's River City has been a long time coming, years in development and the winner of the Rolling World Premiere through the National New Play Network; it is both a tribute to and critical commentary on Grisanti's home town of Louisville, Kentucky.

Actors Theatre's current staging of Macbeth is loud, bloody, and glorious. It's far from a definitive take on one of the Bard's finest tragedies, and no doubt some purists will wince at the modern dress and liberties taken with the script-gone is 'double, double, toil and trouble' as well as the entire porter scene- but for this horror movie fan and Halloween junkie, it's hard to imagine a better production.