CLEVELAND THEATER REVIEWS

WEST SIDE STORY, the Jerome Robbins (concept development), Leonard Bernstein (Music), Arthur Laurents (book), and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), had an interesting road from idea to Broadway production to revivals. The script is now in production by the Baldwin Wallace Department of Theatre and Dance an...

As the lights come up on Joel Drake Johnson's RASHEEDA SPEAKING at Karamu, a shadow of a woman can be seen through the textured door window of a doctor's office....

Ulysses, a former college professor and well-published poet, has been living off the grid for over twenty years. His wife and son assumed he was dead....

Peter Pan has had quite a life. Since his conception by J. M. Barrie, the boy who refused to grow up has been associated with books, plays, films, costumes, art work, a television series, and music, as well as having his name given to a race horse, a food product, a bus line, an emergency health res...

As the lights come up on the thrust stage in Cleveland Play House's Outcalt Theatre, revealed was a large comfortable room, and a woman snuggled up on a chair by a free-standing fireplace, reading a book. Outside a large span of windows, snow could be seen cascading down. Suddenly a car is heard and...

Pat Ciamacco, the curmudgeon of glee and horror, is at it again. While it seems almost by chance, the artistic director of Blank Canvas selects the likes of OUR TOWN, TWELVE ANGRY MEN and OF MICE AND MEN. But most often Ciamacco digs up such scripts as THE WILD PARTY (a play about decadence and unin...

Theater represents the era from which it comes! In 1859, when THE OCTOROON opened in New York, the United States was in racial chaos. The slaves of the South had been 'freed,' but, in reality, they weren't free from their years of enslavement. Yes, blacks, the only mass group of people who came to t...

Yes, in a period of two hours and twenty minutes, plus intermission, 44 plays whoosh across the Cleveland Public Theatre stage. During that time the audience is exposed to all of the United States of America's Presidents. Well, to be honest, there are 45 plays...one, based on the audience vote, an a...

Len Jenkin, the author of LIKE I SAY, which he refers to as a 'sober-minded comedy,' is the recipient of three Obie Awards and received an Emmy nomination....

Caffe Cino, which was founded in 1958, is noted as the site that gave birth to off-off Broadway theatre. It was the invention of retired dancer Joe Cino, who offered a place to do inexpensive creative works in New York City and not have to conform to Equity rules. Cino bankrolled the adventure. The ...

Annie Baker won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in drama for THE FLICK, a thoughtful drama concerning three employees of an art-house movie theatre....

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The Cleveland area has been and is ripe with playwrights. Mike Geither, David Hansen, Margaret Lynch, Jonathan Wilhelm, Michael Oatman, Eric Schmiedl and Faye Sholiton are only a few of the present-day writers. Historically, Langston Hughes, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were proud area playwrig...

THE WHIPPING MAN, which is now on stage at none too fragile theatre, is a tale set at the close of the Civil War in which Caleb DeLeon, a Confederate soldier returns to his Richmond, Virginia, palatial home, now a charred wreckage, to find his family missing and two former slaves, Simon and John, ...

MY FAIR LADY, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's award winning and universally praised musical, based on George Bernard Shaw's play, PYGMALION, centers on Eliza Doolittle, an uneducated Cockney flower girl who, in an attempt to 'become a proper lady,' takes lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a...

Our nation is in the midst of a national election, and local theatres have responded with a series of plays that examine various foibles and stories of political intrigue. Ensemble is staging former County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones' THE BLOODLESS JUNGLE (September 15-October 2) about a rising ...

Adorable eight-year-old girls are supposed to play with dolls, be obsessed with the color pink, and gossip about their friends on a smart phone. Right? Wrong, if you are Tina Denmark. She wants to be a theatrical star. Now! Not later, NOW! (foot stomp!) What will she do to get her dream?...

As the lights come up on The Last Five Years, a musical by Jason Robert Brown, we find Catherine Hiatt (Neely Gevaart) sitting alone. She sings 'Still Hurting' in which she reveals the end of her five year marriage to Jamie....

Many people know Peter Lawson Jones as an attorney, business consultant and former Cuyahoga County Commissioner. Some even know that he is a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actor's Equity and has appeared in films and network television as well as numerous Northeast Ohio and Off-Broadway plays. What few pro...

In 1929 the country was plunged into a financial collapse. The result was a diminishment of funds for not only food and housing, but the collapse of the arts, including the film and theatre industries....

Bathsheba Doran, author of The Mystery of Love and Sex now on stage at Dobama Theatre, stated of the script, 'I had no plans for subject matter. I never do when I begin. As my play stormed out of me, unstoppable and violent, I was horrified. The experience was deeply unpleasant, emotionally. I was t...

SELFIES AT THE CLOWN MOTEL, Christopher Johnston's new play, in world premiere at convergence-continuum...

When KINKY BOOTS played Playhouse Square in April of 2015, while still running on Broadway, it was a really good performance. The show is back again and, believe it or not, it's even better this time around....

Theater people are very superstitious. A light is placed center stage in many theatres, appropriately called the 'ghost light,' to scare off the demons which inhabit many performance places....