“Missed Connections: A Craigslist Musical” is being presented at the New Ohio Theatre after successful runs throughout Canada. It is a musical cantata with lyrics taken or derived from actual ads placed on Craigslist. That indeed ensures a variety of interesting and bizarre subject matter that is approached throughout the ninety-minute production. It is sung through as a rapid succession…
“I want us to start over. I don’t want to fight any more. I don’t want to be angry, all the time. I just want us to be happy, just you and me. No one else.” – Patsy to Trevor, Part 3 “And a garden [for our two dogs] to play in.” – Trevor to Patsy, Part 3 There are…
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity” ― James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” Whether or not we are truly human has been in question since one of the two Judeo-Christian creation myths sported Adam and Eve no…
“It’s like all sandwiched together. And so they tesser to this other planet and Ms. Whatsit turns into this weird horse with wings kind of thing, and the earth from where they look far off is half under the power of this Black Thing.” (Peggy to Salinger) Margaret (Peggy) Salinger, daughter of J. D. Salinger, is a character in Anisa…
“Theatre without alcohol is a museum piece” once quipped Bertolt Brecht. If that’s the case, Meta-Phy Ed’s “Karaoke Bacchae” belongs as far away from MoMA as humanly possible. A drunk, delirious adaptation for Euripides’s ‘The Bacchae’ set in a Karaoke Bar, writer/director Jesse Freedman delivers an enjoyable, if decidedly incoherent dance theatre piece that’s heavy on fun and glamor. For…
There is probably something important in Morgan Gould’s “Losing Tom Pecinka” currently running at the New Ohio Theater as part of this year’s Ice Factory but whatever that might be is buried beneath layers of self-effacing (and self-absorbed) puerile humor that resembles a mashup of the worst Saturday Night Live sketches and the dreariest of daytime soap operas both replete…
If you buy into the old adage ‘good writers steal,’ then Qui Nguyen is the best playwright in town. His post-apocalyptic epic ‘Six Rounds of Vengeance’ presented by the ever-infamous Vampire Cowboys is a flashy potpourri of Tarantino-esque homage. One could practically make a bingo game from the sheer volume of references to Mad Max, Blade, Fallout: New Vegas, Hack/Slash,…
“When you’re poor like us sir … It’s the money, the money! If you haven’t got the money … I mean you can’t bring the likes of us into the world on decency. We’re flesh and blood. Our kind doesn’t get a chance in this world or the next. If we go to heaven they’ll put us to work on…
It is difficult to develop well-rounded and rich characterizations when one has not experienced directly or indirectly the significant conflicts and settings of the characters involved in a play or any other performance piece. Actors attempt that theatrical feat often with varying degrees of success. In the case of “Family Play (1979 to Present),” Collaboration Town’s ensemble-driven creative process does…
“Regret that will make you want to set back the clock. And change things— “ (Jenny Glover) In a re-telling/re-imagining of Robert Heinlein’s 1958-1959 short story “All You Zombies,” B. Walker Sampson’s “My Machine Is Powered by Clocks” tackles weighty concepts using a treasure trove of rhetorical schemes and tropes. The artful syntax of parallelisms, juxtapositions, and antitheses (schemes) are…