KENTUCKY THEATER REVIEWS

a??a??a??a??a??a??a??The Band's Visit is an unusually styled musical based on the 2007 Israeli film. Performed without an intermission, it features Arabian-flavored musical numbers and a mostly upbeat plot. It premiered on Broadway in 2017 and is one of only four musicals to win the 'Big Six' Tony A...

God Bless us, everyone! My childhood came back to me while witnessing the holiday classic A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. This annual production by Actors Theatre of Louisville hit all the high notes on opening night and delivered a magical feast for the eyes, ears, and heart. After four decad...

Derby Dinner Playhouse has earned a reputation in the Kentuckiana area for putting on excellent productions that audiences really enjoy, and their production of Elf: The Musical certainly reinforces this reputation. Elf is based on the 2003 film featuring Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf. The musical r...

A young woman, an actor (Mollie Murk), recounts her experience of being raped by an important theater director. The understanding and compassionate handling of the incident by company producers doesn't obscure the truth that a formal report will almost certainly prevent her inclusion in future produ...

Tom Stoppard may not have created the notion of meta-theatricality but he established his reputation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play that quickly became a milestone in Western theatre and influenced a tendency for heady self-awareness in generations of future playwrights....

Ring Of Walking into the Henry Clay Theater for Pandora Productions' Fun Home, the first thing you notice is the white stage. Blank and solid, like a canvas or a sheet of paper. An artist's stand sits to the side of the stage with drawing pads, pencils, and other supplies. Based on the graphic novel...

If a live performance is memorable for how it surprises you, Mandee McKelvey's My Left Boob is a show I will not soon forget. A stand up comic for 13 years, and a frequent participant in the Character Assassination series of Roasts of Fictional Characters, McKelvey certainly knows how to be funny, y...

With a lot of heart and wit, CAMPT's Next to Normal is an emotional thrill ride that will say with you long after the cast takes a bow....

15 years after the movie premiered, Mean Girls is still making 'Fetch' happen, this time onstage....

Holding On Too LongIn The Secret Garden, Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Marsha Norman writes, 'They're only a ghost if someone alive is still holding on to them.' It is very clear from the top of Haunting Julia that the three characters we meet are haunted by Julia long before she gets the chance...

Rush to TPAC to learn why they tell the story!...

Caryl Churchill's 1982 play Top Girls has so much to say about women that it is staggering to realize that it is no less relevant thirty-seven years later. However it speaks to today, it does so from within an elliptical, non-linear narrative structure emblematic of the time of its creation....

a??a??a??a??a??a??a??Measure for Measure has long been considered one of Shakespeare's 'problem plays' because it doesn't clearly fall into the constructs of his comedies or tragedies. While the play has many of the comedic elements that Shakespeare is known for (mistaken identities, eccentric side ...

Playwright Ken Ludwig has made a name for himself writing some of the funniest modern comedies of any living writer, including Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo, and perhaps most notably, The Game's Afoot. The latter was a mystery-comedy involving real-life actor William Gillette (best known for pl...

Writer Cormac McCarthy subtitled his play The Sunset Limited, 'a novel in dramatic form', and that immediately calls into question exactly what is going on here. Basically it is two guys talking for a couple of hours. They also have coffee and eat. White (J. Barrett Cooper) is a professor whose suic...

A great story, well told, could and should move the audience into feeling something. Whether it's empathy for the protagonist's plight, revulsion at the villain's crimes, or laughing at a clown's antics, if you don't come away from a tale without feeling something, then the author/actors/director/et...

Ghost, a faithful adaptation of the novel by Jason Reynolds, tells the story of Castle 'Ghost' Crenshaw (played by the always-excellent Crystian Wiltshire), an earnest seventh grader who finds himself unexpectedly recruited onto the track team thanks to the encouragement of Coach (Louis Robert Thomp...

Dear Evan Hansen is the oh so rare example of a truly original musical. In a world where musicals based on movies are becoming the rule and not the exception, it's refreshing and almost unheard of for a completely original musical to succeed as it has. The show had a long gestation period that inclu...

In his curtain speech, Artistic Director of Louisville's newest theatre company and director of this production stated that both the company and The Mystery of Irma Vep were long-held dreams coming true....

As with most of August Wilson's work, King Hedley II functions as and can be easily accepted as, flavorful, heated melodrama. But, as the second to the last of The Pittsburgh Cycle, it is so much more. Wilson's plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, tell 100 years of African Amer...

Mind's Eye is back with a rarely seen offering from the amazing Jason Robert Brown....

On September 11th, 2001 the world stopped as two planes collided into The World Trade Center. All eyes were on America in the wake of this unparalleled tragedy. All the while, planes bound for the United States were grounded in a small Newfoundland town called Gander....

When Harvey Fierstein dropped this story on the world in1981 as Torch Song Trilogy, it ran more than four hours. It was a seminal work in LGBTQA+ theatre, a frighteningly intimate story contained within an epic timeframe....

When a 17-year-old boy gets brutally murdered at the hands of the police, a rising hip hop trio finds themselves at odds with one another as they decide to use fame to speak out or stay silent. Hype Man: a break beat play is ripped from the headlines, realistic and cool. Actors Theatre of Louisville...

Each time I review theatre written and performed in another language, my disadvantage forces me to think differently about what I'm seeing. I kind of enjoy the challenge but there is undeniable risk that I will not fully comprehend some of the detail and nuance carried in the language....