Tesori’s music is tidy where it should be a fiery mess, and the traces of Broadway conventions (a reliance on pop pastiche and crowd-pleasing numbers) mute Kron’s shifty writing and the source material.
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Youth Speaks has taught countless young people to value what they have to say, what they see and hear around them, their minds and the ability to speak uncomfortable truths with joy and care.
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Brilliance makes its own rules, goes where it wants, and disappears all too soon. So here are the new rules of 2016.
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The holiday tale is a tricky beast. We need stories that promise warmth and comfort -- an escape from the cold, dark days of winter. And yet they also have to have a bite to them, a recognition that death is always a hair's breath away.
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Why the circus is fascinating remains a grand riddle. The emotions elicited by the art form are often so wild and contradictory that all you want is to harmonize them and find your way back to the normal, everyday world.
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Only the cruelest of Gods would have bothered to create the Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950). To fashion a mind and body that approached the perfection of music and then to let it shatter and decay into madness, and all of it just before the age of film, is the work of a punk and a sadist.
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The artist biography, whether on stage, film, or the written page, is a precarious and dangerous form. It can lead even the best storytellers into a plodding parade of "this happened, and then that happened, and, oh, this happened again."
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If you’ve ever wondered whether a stage production could be strangely incompetent and yet somehow deliver a low-key evening of interest, then you might want to go to Performers Under Stress’ production of Bryn Magnus’ Black River Falls
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As Shotgun's production of Who's Afraid unfurls its way to Albee’s haunting end, the production becomes so simple and alive that it hardly feels as if the brilliant cast is acting at all.
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The Thrillpeddlers like San Francisco are high on sensation and low on feeling and so in that sense they're a perfect expression of each other's worst traits.
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