BALTIMORE THEATER REVIEWS

They sure don't write them like Holiday anymore. A play about the foibles of a family of rich White people that supplies no meaningful social or racial context, a critique of the world of wealth which is bafflingly superficial, and a romance almost lacking in visible courtship, playwright Philip Bar...

There’s so much to like in Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s current revival of Twelfth Night, a production that succeeds in big things and small, that I can’t imagine any spectator walking away unsatisfied. What did our critic think of TWELFTH NIGHT at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company?...

Funny, sharp, elegant and engaging--DINNER AND CAKE serves up an evening of original and uniquely entertaining theater....

Dated and flawed as I consider it, Sweet Charity is something of a landmark in the world of the American musical, and this rendition is admirable. And then there are those three big songs. You will definitely experience good times, fun and some laughs....

A well-made, stunning play, about racist mental hospital practices in the not very long-distant past, with four strongly-imagined characters and an explosive ending....

In the end, it is largely the combination of sensitively-selected detail and poetic diction on the one hand, and the big-picture view of various interlocked social problems that makes the show so extraordinary. In that big picture, the problems are too pervasive, too ingrained to surmount, and well-...

Babel, which invites us to contemplate a world, apparently in the near future, in which the human genome is so well understood that every person’s – and fetus’s – potential, including the potential for antisocial behavior – is determinable, and if a child cannot be “certified” while in...

The play is an ungodly and irremediable mess, but it does demonstrate the importance of the proposition for which the central character was willing to put his career at risk, i.e., that more care needs to be taken, by industry and government alike, of secrets – their own and everyone else’s....

This is more a theater piece than a play, Caridad Svich's choral meditation on the plight of the earth and the humans who inhabit it....

This is playwright Chisa Hutchinson's their outing at CATF. I liked both of her previous entries, and she continue to wax both original and amusing, without slighting the serious messages she always delivers....

A multi-talented cast in a unique, romantic setting makes for a lovely summer evening. Shakespeare's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING is the progenitor of the modern rom-com. Maybe this is why it has been placed in so many different eras of civilization from its original Renaissance setting to Edwardian Engla...

What did our critic think?If you don't have cable, watch SpongeBob Squarepants nor any clue why SpongeBob should be a Broadway musical, no worries. Everything is made clear for those entering Bikini Bottom for the first time. It's packed with family theater elements: bright colors, important themes,...

What did out critic think? The essential attribute of the play, the combative romance of Benedick and Beatrice (Dylan Arredondo and Anna DiGiovanni), is the only truly sacred element of the play. Dylan Arredondo and Anna DiGiovanni, give these principals a full-throated presentation, Arredondo leani...

Five wise-cracking southern belles come to know way more about each other than they intended as bridesmaids....

For audience members of a certain age (like moi), jukebox musicals are much more than an evening’s entertainment. Sometimes they are a Soul Train dance down the days of our youth. Such is the case with Ain’t Too Proud, The Life and Times of The Temptations. Now playing in Baltimore at the Hippod...

Dream Hou$e is awash in ideas, about Latinx identity, about generational wealth transfers, about gentrification, about memory versus history, about personal authenticity, about priorities, about the inherent value of things, about the TV biz, etc., etc., etc. You wouldn’t expect a package of all t...

To put the biggest problem in contemporary terms, terms which doubtless occurred to many members of the audience besides just me: Is this a play about Zelensky or is it a play about Putin? You can characterize it as the story of a small army’s gallant victory against a much larger and better-equip...

New talent joins Toby's regulars to present ROCKY THE MUSICAL at Toby's in Columbia. Inspired by an actual 1974 boxing match, the unknown Rocky Balboa 'goes the distance' against superstar Apollo Creed, proving to himself, his lady love and all of Philly that an underdog can have teeth. Music and ly...

Pretty Woman, The Musical has shimmered onto the stage at Baltimore's Hippodrome and landed squarely on it's Jimmy Choo'd feet. A bold and brassy tune fest, it's an homage to the 1990 film starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere and this version's cast is definitely up to the inevitable comparisons....

Because good theatre not only makes you feel the feels....

...it is as fine a theatrical treatment of this oft-produced - not though not oft enough - play as I’ve ever seen...

there's hardly a joke that misfires, hardly a dance step that doesn't thrill, and hardly a song that doesn't connect. It all works together, and the audience will leave utterly sated. Not to miss....

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God bless us everyone for this lovely start to the Holiday Season of theatre...

Fires in the Mirror is Anna Deavere Smith's now-classic theatre piece about the Crown Heights, Brooklyn disturbances of 1991, the singular point of which is that it's impossible to know exactly what to think about those events either....