PITTSBURGH THEATER REVIEWS

Never underestimate the power of hiring the full orchestra...

Unlike most works of historical fiction, the vibes in this new dramedy are so good, you almost don't need the biographical tie-ins at all....

The only constant is change, as anyone will tell you, and Front Porch Theatricals has always epitomized that. Other than knowing their shows are going to be good, you could go in knowing everything or nothing (more often nothing) about their curated picks and walk out satisfied. ...

Amazingly, some things never DO go out of style....

After twenty years as a preeminent Rocky Horror town, the most radical thing you can do with a Pittsburgh Rocky is be traditional....

Michael Frayn's legendary farce returns, in the Public's most go-for-broke physical comedy yet....

Here's a fun fact about me: I have never played one of the Four Plaids, but I have been in many, many productions of Forever Plaid. There used to be a drawer in my house full of printed-out certificates and plaid-covered dental floss, tokens of my repeat apearances as the 'special audience volunteer...

When it comes to Stephen Sondheim, people often have very strong opinions on 'blue-book Sondheim' (the first half of his memoirs is a blue book covering his origins through Merrily) versus 'pink book Sondhiem' (the second half, a pink book, covers Sunday through Bounce)....

If you saw Very Berry Dead at Big Storm last year (and I hope you did), you probably had some idea what to expect with actor/writer José Pérez IV's latest show, To Battle. You'd be right, but you'd also be wrong. Both shows blend absurdism and realism, comedy and drama, and tease out revelations t...

One of the biggest debates in the world of theatre is over the genre of Anton Chekhov's masterpiece of early modernism, The Seagull. It's been almost universally acknowledged as a tragedy... except by Chekhov himself, who intended it as a comedy....

A refreshingly non-replica production design breathes new life into the sometimes-overexposed property.aOne of the fascinating things about modern musicals is also one of the most frustrating: we are experiencing them as what Richard Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk....

Stripped-down production values but a game cast make the Pythonesque musical fly. There used to be a blog called 'Low Budget Beasts,' which eventually evolved to 'Low Budget Shreks.' Like the title implies, it was a site full of photos mocking community and small professional theatres for staging pr...

If any company in the area can be said to have a formula for its seasons, that is a fair assessment of Saint Vincent Summer Theatre's usual years: a farce, a revue of pre-rock songs from stage and screen, and then a Roger Bean style nostalgic jukebox musical. ...

If you don't know the capsule plot of Back to the Future yet, close this review and go pull it up for streaming, or check TBS (Back to the Future is almost always running on TBS these days)....

Marya Sea Kaminski ends her tenure at the Public with her most ambitious and open-hearted production yet...

It's an oldie but a goodie, and Saint Vincent knows farce like nobody else....

I'm a millennial, and a nerd. Of course I love Avenue Q. It reminds me of seventh through ninth grade, when the nascent internet first started spreading clips of the music from this 'raunchy puppet show on Broadway.'...

This new musical makes a case both for its own mainstream success and for its heroine as an under-appreciated icon....

Pittsburgh's most reliable indie company scores again with a little-seen concept musical....

It's a wonder Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder film, has held up as well as it does without seeming totally creaky and outdated. This is, after all, a 1959 Hollywood comedy, albeit one that is remarkably fluid in its attitudes towards both gender and sexuality....

Is Jesus the hero of Jesus Christ Superstar? It's a question people have debated for years, first spurred by lyricist Tim Rice quipping (possibly sarcastically) in the early seventies that Christ was the villain of the piece, not the hero. The brilliance of the piece is in its almost ambivalent repo...

The first thing I noticed in the theatre at City Theatre's Birthday Candles was the set. I'm a longtime lover of thrift shops, junk shops and the maximalist 'detail everywhere' aesthetic of the Disney Imagineers. My companion for the night and I spent the preshow prying the set apart with our eyes (...

One of the oddest dramedies in recent history is also one of the most satisfyingly heartfelt....

It's a very good play about a very bad play. That's the capsule version of what you'll see at Justin Emeka's production of Alice Childress's once-controversial Trouble in Mind. Though written in 1955, the mix of seriousness and satire in the piece feels shockingly contemporary, both in terms of its ...

Frank Wildhorn's Jekyll & Hyde has long been a divisive show among theatre fans. Is it a worthy follow-up to the other literary-based megamusicals of the eighties and nineties, like Les Miserables, Martin Guerre and Miss Saigon? Or is it a trashy, boneheaded knockoff of Sweeney Todd with more power ...