KENTUCKY THEATER REVIEWS

I can honestly say that Broadway's musical Two by Two was new to me, as was the TheatreWorks of Southern Indiana company. As I love to be introduced to productions and theater groups that are unfamiliar to me, I got two for the price of one. I know there has to be a joke in there somewhere!...

Singing and dancing Mormons take the stage yet again in Cincinnati as The Book of Mormon plays yet another engagement....

We have of late become more and more aware as a society of the contrast in how we look at our selves and each other based on our differences. That we are waking up to this like the dawning of the new day also illustrates how we had allowed ourselves to become complacent about the dramatic changes of...

In a recent social media exchange, a man related to me how he was not interested in watching Hannah Gadsby's acclaimed Netflix special because he didn't need to feel ashamed. I think he misses the point. The most important thing that art can do is force us to reexamine our biases and preconceptions....

Do creative imagination and madness go hand-in-hand? We too often talk about Van Gogh as if only mental illness could ever account for his genius, and there have been many stories told about how the people that seek refuge in the asylum might be escaping the insanity of a violent and unforgiving wor...

When you see as much live theatre as I do, you inevitably have expectations, and one of the challenges becomes how to be fair about preconception. Ideally, a reviewer sits in the dark not knowing what they will encounter, but foreknowledge is usually the norm. You know the company, you know the play...

The great playwrights touch on the truths that lie beneath the surface. Before I went to see this new production of Sam Shepard's Fool for Love (1983) I had been thinking about cycles, in particular how a new book I had just started outlined the rise of a reactionary conservative political movement ...

If you are like me you remember where you were when certain global events occurred, both positive and negative. I remember where I was when the Challenger exploded when the Berlin Wall came down...when a lone gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and began to shoot. When the smoke cleared ther...

Treachery, lies, high tension, deception...but enough about current political events, the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival is delivering a modern retelling of Othello. This tragedy delivers some excellent drama that is every bit as heavy as the humid Louisville heat and even more hard-hitting....

What more pleasant way to spend a summer evening than outdoors in the heart of Old Louisville, surrounded by green space, with some of the loveliest turns of phrase ever written in the English language wafting on the breeze? Thanks to Kentucky Shakespeare and its supporters, we can do just that - fr...

Bunbury Theatre has offered an impressive season this year, with John Logan's Red serving as its crowning jewel. I have to say I was unfamiliar with Master Harold and the Boys going into this production, but it is safe to say that Bunbury rides the momentum generated by Red and ends this stellar sea...

The classic bloody story comes to life onstage....

Kentucky Shakespeare Festival opens a new summer season with laughs and gusto in The Comedy of Errors. A delightful romp at the C. Douglas Ramey Amphitheater in Central Park, the play serves up boundless humor in a manner comparable to a Bugs Bunny cartoon set in Greece. The rain did not hinder a si...

In a rough East London flat, Cougar Glass (Remy Sisk) sits nearly naked under a sunlamp, implacable behind sunglasses, drinking beer and smoking a cigarette. As his partner, Captain Tock (Brian Hinds) talks incessantly while setting up for Cougar's '19th' birthday party, the sleek narcissist remains...

Sometimes a character stands out from the source material and starts to establish its own reputation. Actors start to circle the part and gauge if and when they might get a crack at it. For men, in straight non-musical plays, Hamlet, Macbeth, Willy Loman, Stanley Kowalski, are a few that have achiev...

Sherry Kramer's How Water Behaves is kind of a crazy play. Warm, funny, engaging, illogical, improbable, and slightly surreal - it is maddening in how it pulls these disparate qualities together for a conclusion that explodes expectations of narrative logic while somehow staying true to its own, uni...

A good villain is hard to come by. Bad guys are hardly the type of characters you root for but when they suck you in-watch out! At Commonwealth Theater Center's annual Young Shakespeare Festival, the current installment of Richard III zeros in on the villainous King Richard who manipulates, slaughte...

In her staging of The Merry Wives of Windsor, director Jennifer Pennington taps into the unique reservoir of contextual opportunities of a mid-Twentieth Century setting. By placing the action in the 1950's, she puts a refreshing spin on one of the most featherweight of Shakespeare's comedies....

Dialing It UpThis quote from a live cabaret performance by Charles Busch could be referencing his play, Die! Mommie Die!, which is a parody of the kind of grotesque, overwrought melodrama that fueled the careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the 1960's. Busch is certainly juicing up an old mod...

I'll be honest. I was not a huge fan of the musical Oklahoma! In my opinion, it's one of those creaky old chestnuts that gets done to death by every theater company at some point or another, right up there with other overdone 'classics' like The Music Man, My Fair Lady, or Oliver! I appreciate the h...

Boatwright is an original play written by and starring Emmy Nominated Actor Patrick Tovatt about an eccentric man getting up in years living in a humble abode where he spends his days writing and singing little ditties on his guitar and building boats. One day, a young man walks into his establishme...

Christmas. A time of family togetherness - that's the tradition anyway. But Paula Vogel knows that the holidays are also a time in which long-simmering conflicts rise to the surface. In The Long Christmas Ride Home, she presents one family's yuletide journey from home after a confrontational visit w...

The brand new Lincoln Center production of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical opens in Cincinnati....

This two-person show begins in a remote getaway where a reticent but gifted writer, Olivia (Lauren Argo), has sought seclusion to write a novel. In the middle of a blizzard, a brash and youthful Sex-blogger, Ethan (Winston Blake), bursts in, disrupting Olivia's quiet. Appearing to be complete opposi...

Documentary-style theater is not a genre I am well-versed in. It very well may be that I have missed out on a preponderance of strong examples, but the only play that springs to mind readily is Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project. Like that play, Stanton's we, the invisibles employs personal anecdo...