Arts
Is there any more vexing wee-hours quandary than "What is art?" According to Teller of Penn & Teller, "Art is anything we do after the chores are done." By that reasoning, most things we do can be art, as long as we enjoy them. (Ideally, someone else enjoys them, too.)
Stage
I had every reason to believe I'd love director Linda Whitney's production of Jesus Christ Superstar. I admire her work, enjoy the play, and spend far more time thinking about Jesus than many hardcore Christians. I was so sure I'd love it that, with my wife at a Salt-N-Pepa show
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On Oct. 6, 1998, two Laramie men, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, offered 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, openly gay, a ride home from a bar called the Fireside Lounge. They drove him outside of town, beat him with fists, pistol-whipped him, tied him to a shake fence and left
Stage
On Oct. 6, 1998, two Laramie men, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, offered 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, openly gay, a ride home from a bar called the Fireside Lounge. They drove him outside of town, beat him with fists, pistol-whipped him, tied him to a shake fence and left him to
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Olympia Little Theater's production of Same Time, Next Year stars Jeff Hirschberg and Rebecca Lea McCarthy. Director James Patrick cast mature actors and let the script catch up with them. This presents Hirschberg and McCarthy with the challenge of acting 25 while looking, well, not 25, and
Stage
Two-handers are tough. A two-hander, in theater parlance, is a full-length show with only two characters. I performed one a while back, Oleanna by David Mamet, and I can tell you it nearly broke my brain. There's nowhere to hide. You're on stage the whole time, and you have to
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This is a brand-new show, Olympia Family Theater's second premiere of the season (after Wind in the Willows, currently recording its cast album). It derives from Ellen Jackson's 1998 book of the same name, in which Edna, the girl who lives next door to sad sack Cinder Ella, goes
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I wasn't supposed to review this production. My wife, Amanda Stevens, is in Cinder Edna, so fellow Weekly Volcano scribe Joann Varnell was going to critique it, as she has with several shows during my thespian spring biathlon (Robin Hood and Legally Blonde). Then Joann realized she had Memorial Day
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N. Richard Nash's Rainmaker is just shy of 60 years old, but is it dated? Not a bit. It's the story of a young woman who sees herself as plain, a gruff deputy who wishes he could hold her attention, and a charismatic stranger who promises rain
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I hope Lakewood Playhouse Artistic Director John Munn won't mind me telling you this, but a week before his company's production of The Rainmaker opened, we had an earnest conversation about "dated" play scripts. John lamented the fact that critics are often dismissive of 20th-century scripts audiences know and love.
Stage
In 2010, Shakespeare expert Brean Hammond of Nottingham University declared that the 1727 Lewis Theobald play Double Falsehood was, as Theobald claimed, a reboot of an earlier play called Cardenio. What's the big deal, you ask? Cardenio is one of a handful of plays co-written by William Shakespeare but since
Stage
When Quentin Tarantino's first directing effort, Reservoir Dogs, landed in 1992, I'd never seen anything like it. That's not to say there'd never been anything like it. No, Tarantino came of age as a video clerk, and as I dug deeper into Netflix, I found similarities to any number of
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Ordinarily, writing a short play takes weeks or even months. As it moves into production, everyone from the cast to the director to the guy who delivers sandwiches has editorial input. What began with a clear authorial vision might veer off in any number of unexpected directions. The Double
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Ordinarily, writing a short play takes weeks or even months. As it moves into production, everyone from the cast to the director to the guy who delivers sandwiches has editorial input. What began with a clear authorial vision might veer off in any number of unexpected directions. The Double Shot
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On the off chance you've never seen the movie, here's the gist: a crime boss named Joe Cabot and his adult son, "Nice Guy Eddie," hire six thugs under pseudonyms to pull a diamond heist. The heist, which we never see, goes utterly sideways, and the thieves reassemble at their
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As ostensible comedies go, The Philadelphia Story is only marginally funnier than Philadelphia. Barry drops dozens of 1930s references you'll need the glossary in the program to understand, but not many jokes. It's one of those plays where people take a magic narcotic that makes them blab
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To avoid burying the lead, let me say right up front that Harlequin Productions does an unimpeachable job of producing Phillip Barry's 1939 The Philadelphia Story. Billed as a romantic comedy, it's programmed as an obvious enticement to older patrons. That makes my review an unusually difficult one to write. Imagine
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It seems to me that 1960's Oliver!, adapted and composed by Lionel Bart, set the very model for a modern Broadway musical. It has all the elements we associate with the form. Its protagonist is a scrappy orphan (cf. Annie, Gavroche in Les Misérables) who uses his
Stage
It seems to me that 1960's Oliver!, adapted and composed by Lionel Bart, set the very model for a modern Broadway musical. It has all the elements we associate with the form. Its protagonist is a scrappy orphan (cf. Annie, Gavroche in Les Misérables) who uses his first solo number
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You may not be familiar with the wrestling phenomenon known as lucha libre, but it's all the rage in Mexico, where its popularity lags only behind that of soccer. Like American professional wrestling, it has its heroes (técnicos) and its villains (rudos), and it attracts shapely women. Unlike WWE matches,
