by CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE Cyrano, at the Park Square Theatre, offers swoon-inducing romance and swashbuckling action in this modern adaptation by Michael Hollinger. J C Cutler in the title role and Emily Gunyou Halaas, as Cyrano’s love interest Roxane, deliver poignant and tender performances that had many audience members sniffling during several romantic exchanges. The small cast takes on…
by SOPHIE KERMAN How many ping pong balls can you pick up in 30 seconds? In 15 seconds, can you come up with 5 different things that you’d like to put in a mailbox but probably shouldn’t, because you’re pretty sure it’s a felony? Game shows are weird, unpredictable, and completely arbitrary, and this might…
by SOPHIE KERMAN If you haven’t heard of Transatlantic Love Affair yet, you might be a little bit behind the curve. The company has been creating its own brand of physical theatre since 2010, and has been picking up Ivey Awards and annual Fringe Favorites left and right ever since. Their ability to captivate audiences year after…
To continue my weirdly thematic Fringe experience, today I saw three plays about the things you can learn when on a journey. From the underworld to ancient Greece to contemporary immigrants, the who and the where seems less important than the what: a lot of truths get revealed when you put yourself in a different…
Welcome to Day 1 of Fringe, where every show looks great and you haven’t yet memorized the pre-show announcements! This is the first in a long series of posts between now and August 11, so keep checking back as we see more and more shows. I don’t like to intentionally theme my Fringe viewing experience,…
by EMILY MEISLER, guest reviewer After exiting the Saturday night production of Red Resurrected, I turned to my friend who accompanied me to the production and asked, “So, what did you think?” She paused. “It was good.” She smiled politely. “It was well done….but I’m not a theater person.” There are some beautiful moments in Red…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Need a break from winter? Step into the Walking Shadow‘s inventive production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a well-timed throwback to the distant autumn days when the leaves – not the snow – crunched underfoot and it was the shivers down your spine, not a feel-good Valentine’s card, that made you sit just…
by SOPHIE KERMAN You can always rely on the Sandbox Theatre, with its years-long play development process, to present something new, challenging, and seamlessly executed. Beatnik Giselle, performed for just one weekend at the Southern Theater, tackles heavy questions of sexuality and self-expression through a framework of dance, music, and Beat poetry: not a traditional piece of…
by SOPHIE KERMAN The program for Savage Umbrella’s latest production, Care Enough, cites quotes from Vaclav Havel, John Berger, Susan Sontag, and Cat Power (among others) as the play’s inspiration. If that does not immediately seem like a red flag to you, let me explain why it should. Works like Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others”…
by MIRA REINBERG Long before Elizabethan comedies of error and late medieval or early modern French farce there was a genre of popular comedy that we recognize as the picaresque novel or “story-telling.” The earliest and rare example of such a picaresque tale is a second-century AD novel by Lucius Apuleius, entitled The Golden Ass,…
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