Every time I attend one of Thaddeus Phillips’s one-man shows, more of my friends ask to accompany me. Phillips is a genuine phenomenon, and his performances delight and amaze. He’s an experimental-theater artist who works with words, puppets, objects, sound, video, toys, light and shadow to create entirely original worlds…
It’s the ultimate question, the one that preoccupies all active minds: Why death? Why the inevitable, final dissolution? And why the process — nasty, smelly, embarrassing — by which we lose ourselves, degenerating bit by bit into squalling infants, with none of the charm of infants or their ability to…
God’s Trombones is the title of a book by James Weldon Johnson, published in 1927 and consisting of seven poem-sermons. Johnson, best known for the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was hugely influenced by African-American folk tradition and by the preachers he heard in church on Sundays, and his…
Oliver! is among the best musicals ever written. But in 1960, when Lionel Bart — then a young, working-class composer — prepared for its debut, many critics were dubious. Although Charles Dickens’s novel, Oliver Twist, on which the musical is based, is full of fascinating, eccentric and entirely original characters,…
John Patrick Shanley’s Italian American Reconciliation is an amiable amble of a play that revolves around the friendship of two men in New York’s Little Italy. Aldo Scalicki (Tony Catanese) is a funny, fast-talking mama’s boy who has never managed to maintain a relationship with a woman. Huey Maximilian Bonfigliano…
I haven’t seen Eric Bogosian himself perform, and I haven’t read his work, so I really don’t know if his writing is as drop-dead funny as actor Alex Ray June’s performance makes it appear, or if June is as brilliant an actor as he seems to be when doing Bogosian’s…
Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle is a bracing black comedy, an exploration of the nature of evil. But if the topic is murky, the play is not. It’s as straightforward, clean and ruthless as a pen stroke. The action takes place in a milieu we recognize from Alan Bennett and…
Playwright Kenneth Lonergan is, among other things, a poet of confused and disaffected youth. He’s perhaps best known for writing and directing the film You Can Count on Me, which involves a young woman and her charmingly feckless brother — played, respectively, by Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. The protagonist…
The news at Country Dinner Playhouse is that Bill McHale — artistic director from the time the playhouse opened in 1970 until his premature retirement in 2000 — is back. Which means that after three years of lackluster productions, there’s a strong, vibrant show on stage. Sure, it’s that hoary…
All the sad young men, drifting through the town Drinking up the night, trying not to drown — “Ballad of All the Sad Young Men,” by Thomas J. Wolf Jr. and Frances Landesman William Inge’s Picnic so entirely typifies the ethos of the 1950s that it forces a director to…
In Blue/Orange, Christopher (Keith L. Hatten), a young black man, is awaiting his release from a London psychiatric hospital, where he’s been held for 28 days of observation. However, his psychiatrist, Bruce (Steven Cole Hughes), isn’t sure he’s ready to be discharged. He fears that Christopher is displaying all the…
We remember Oscar Wilde today primarily for his epigrammatic wit — the nineteenth-century bons mots that have lost none of their sharpness or humor over the intervening decades. This was a man whose last words were supposedly “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Wilde’s theories of aesthetics, his faith…
I’ve never been a particular fan of John Denver, other than acknowledging that he wrote a few pleasant tunes. And despite decades living in Colorado, I’ve been pretty much immune to the myth of the West. My dreams are filled with cities — Prague, London, New York — rather than…
Underneath the Lintel is a seventy-minute one-act play that takes the form of a lecture by a buttoned-up, pedantic, spiritually timid Dutch ex-librarian. Peering into the audience at the very beginning, he lets us know that he’s disappointed by the turnout (despite the fact that the Aurora Fox theater is…
After ducking a little local controversy, the two-man Puppetry of the Penis is yanking in the Colorado crowds. Lincoln Davies and new-kid-on-the-jock Jef Benjamin are exposing their talents in the name of art. Once you get used to the terror of seeing two naked men and a seventeen-by-fourteen-foot Godzilla-sized phallus…
Simon Morley, the Aussie creator of the internationally notorious comedy Puppetry of the Penis, summed up his unlikely theatrical juggernaught with a smile and a shrug in one interview. “It’s art. It’s a piece of skin. It’s there to be laughed at. Get over it,” he said. Considering that Morley’s…
I would like to say things were otherwise, really I would. I would like to find all kinds of nuance and dozens of brilliantly esoteric references in the LIDA Project’s production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony. I’d like to have been titillated, frightened or inspired, because it is, after all,…
In Elevator, the first of Buntport Theater’s two original one-acts presented under the title Misc. , three people stand in an elevator, pretty much unmoving. We’re treated to several silent minutes, during which we study the actors’ expressions. A fourth person gets into the elevator, then gets off. There’s a…
Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America in 2001 partly as a response to President Clinton’s 1996 reorganization of welfare, which kicked recipients off the rolls if they had not gone to work after two years. Before doing research for the book, Ehrenreich already knew…
The strongest things in the Shadow Theatre Company’s ambitious production of Macbeth are Jeffrey Nickelson’s performance in the title role and the way director Buddy Butler deals with the supernatural elements. Macbeth’s witches always present a problem. They’re sometimes portrayed as wrinkled hags and sometimes as beautiful young women; sometimes…
Urinetown is set after a drought so severe that people no longer have private toilets; everyone must use run-down, unsanitary public amenities controlled by a monster corporation called Urine Good Company. Poor people pay more than they can afford for this privilege, and anyone trying to pee anywhere unauthorized suffers…
The Drawer Boy is a droll, humorous, slowly spun story that’s often gently charming. It’s based on a Canadian theater project carried out in 1972, when a group of actors from Toronto went to live in a farming community and created a play about their experiences there. You can catch…
