ST. LOUIS THEATER REVIEWS

2017 Tony Award winner for Best Play, Oslo, by J.T. Rogers, is Repertory Theatre St. Louis' artistic director Steven Woolf's final directing project before his retirement begins. It is the story of the Norwegian couple-an academic and social scientist, Terje, who has developed a new approach to conf...

Avenue Q, winner of the 2004 Tony awards for Best Book, Best Musical, and Best Score, makes its Playhouse at Westport Plaza debut, and, although I've seen other fine productions of this musical, Westport is the perfect venue-intimate and cozy-for this beloved brazen show....

The New Jewish Theatre has opened 'District Merchants', by Aaron Posner, and it is certainly among the finest productions I've ever seen there. Posner's script is most remarkably beautiful-it's masterful indeed....

On a very chilly Tuesday night, Fiddler on the Roof opened and warmed the hearts of the enthusiastic audience at the Fabulous Fox.  This Broadway revival was full of new energy and more emotion than expected with this beloved classic....

There's that initial low, stealthy tip-toeing pizzicato, like a Warner Brothers cat creeping up on a clever mouse. Then an oboe slips in, and other woodwinds, some piccolo. Then (SURPRISE!) a racing, romping foretaste of the musical fun to follow. It's the utterly delicious overture to Giochino Ross...

The Upstream Theater has opened a lovely production of Wittenberg, by David Davalos. It is a 'tragical-comical-historical play', a genre first mentioned by Polonius and rarely seen thereafter. (I guess Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead would fill the bill.) Here in Wittenberg we meet ...

Playwrights Kristen Adele Calhoun and Michael Thomas Walker's new drama, Canfield Drive, received its world premier this month, after being co-commissioned by 651 Arts in partnership with The St. Louis Black Repertory Company and the National Performance Network. Under development for the past four ...

Carl Overly, Jr. has made his directorial debut with the St. Louis premier of The Motherf**ker with the Hat by Stephen Adly Guirgis at R-S Theatrics, and it is an effort to be applauded. This play, as you might suspect from its title, is graphic and realistic, a dramedy about people who survive in t...

Max & Louie Productions has opened its 10th season with the St. Louis premier of the one-woman show Love, Linda at The Marcelle. Debby Lennon, a member of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus for 31 seasons, plays the elegant Linda Lee Thomas (aka Mrs. Cole Porter), whose devotion to her husband drove much...

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This, as the opening line of Alabama Story tells us, is a story about two rabbits. It's a story about 1959 Montgomery, where cotton is king, where conservative white men call all the shots, and where books that might be about integration are censored. It is a battle of wills between a segregationist...

Anyone familiar with the Tony-Award-winning musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables knows it is a grand indulgence for the eyes, ears, and mind. The Cameron Mackintosh and Networks touring production (with new staging and reimagined scenery inspired by the paintings of Victor Hugo!)...

Four years ago the New Jewish Theatre offered a side-splitting evening of 'Four Old Jews Telling Jokes'; now they offer 'An Act of God'. Once again it's an evening of stand-up comedy. So, who do you think could tell a joke better than an old Borscht-Belt Jewish comic? Do I hear you cry, 'Nobody!'? W...

Based on the classic Charles Dickens novel, the Nebraska Theatre Caravan's touring production of the musical A Christmas Carol opened for this weekend only on December 6 at The Fox. It is the moving tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, whose devotion to his money interferes with his ability to make meaningful ...

Whether you're 7 or 107, Philip Grecian's adaptation of the 1983 cult classic film, A Christmas Story, will likely tickle your funny bone and get you reminiscing about holidays past. You'll be greeted at your seat by evocative Christmas carols and a stage flanked with decked-out trees and shiny, wra...

You only have two more chances to see Rebel and Misfits' Macbeth: Come Like Shadows, directed by Sean Patrick Higgins and Kelly Hummert, and even in a city of generous theatre offerings, you will probably not have the opportunity to see anything else quite like this. Not anytime soon anyway. Cancel ...

Admissions, a brand-new dramedy by playwright Joshua Harmon, provides a timely and realistic view into contemporary upper-middle-class liberalism, with its barbed humor and challenging subject matter....

Lauren Gunderson's Silent Sky is the factual story of astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, whose turn-of-the-century career had an important effect on science and discovery throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries....

Variety Theatre presented their production of Disney's The Little Mermaid at the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts from October 18th thru 21st.  This performance celebrated the 10th Anniversary of Variety Theatre, the country's only production of its kind  that features Variety children with disa...

Chef, a play by UK/Egyptian playwright Sabrina Mahfouz and winner of the 2014 Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival, made its U.S. premier at Upstream Theatre, opening the 2018-19 season. Linda Kennedy starred in this one-woman show, directed by renowned Swiss director Marianne de Pury....

A scandalous drama is still politically potent after 139 years! When Nora Helmer slammed that door in 1879 she told the world that her duty to herself was greater than her duty to her family. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House has been an iconic inspiration to generations of second-wave feminists. In ...

As the story goes in Gilbert & Sullivan's 1879 operetta, The Pirates of Penzance, Frederic the pirate has just been released from his indenture to a comical band of soft-hearted pirates when he meets Mabel, the daughter of Major-General Stanley, and falls in love. As the story also goes, in 2013, Ne...

Lillian Hellman's 1939 drama, The Little Foxes, is a well-made drama about Southern aristocratic avarice and female suppression. When brothers Oscar (Bob Gerchen) and Ben (Chuck Brinkley) Giddens-who have inherited the whole of their father's fortune-go to their sister Regina (Kari Ely) needing mone...

The St. Louis Opera Collective is an adventurous tiny company that brings us chamber operas. Their current offering at the Kranzberg Studio is Three Decembers, with music by Jake Heggie and libretto by Gene Scheer....

I first saw Paula Stoff perform-oh, years ago¬-in a revue by the Non-Prophet Theatre. They had some fine local talent who were performing very well indeed. But when Paula stepped into the spot-light and sang I swallowed my gum! What in the world was this Broadway talent doing with this tiny comp...