Perhaps like no other recent work for the musical stage, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is so eminently adaptable and bendable as theater that it practically cries out for fresh treatments. In the case of ...

The play twists some assumptions about that paranoid era. This play is unlikely to appeal to the Tea Party, but, as it turns out, some of Pilford’s paranoia is justified. In this tale, Communists do have a grip on Hollywood, ...

It’s almost silly to review these things. If you like musicals, you’ll like Clarence Brown Theatre’s production of Kiss Me, Kate. You won’t lose money betting they get a standing ovation every night. There’s a lot of energy in the ...

Here’s your dilemma: You’re in a cafe with a lone stranger whose incessantly ringing cellphone is bugging you. He’s the most annoying jerk in the world until you walk over to give him a piece of your mind, and you ...

Craig Smith's debut is an interesting and unpredictable thriller, often darkly funny, with moments of physical violence and with a few shocks along the way that elicited gasps from the audience.

Directed by Kate Buckley, Black Pearl Sings! turns out to be better than you expect it to be. The premise—a naïve white folklorist interviewing a black convict for the “authentic” songs she knows—seems a recipe for sanctimony, and an after-school ...

Fuddy Meers is a comedy about cognitive dysfunction, but don’t go with a grim sense of duty and a checkbook. It is not an appeal for greater awareness for dementia or posttraumatic stress disorder, with a website that shows how ...

Heroes isn’t as bleak or, probably, as provocative as Beckett, but like that crypto-existentialist’s work, occasionally breaks through the mundane reality of mere sadness to absurdity, which can make the human condition seem pretty hilarious.

This is a modern-style Broadway musical, not much like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, maybe, but not so different from, say, Rent.

I wish I could square my regular dismay at being obliged to review another all-too-familiar musical with the fact—hard to confess to my intellectual pals—that I enjoy them, usually more than the fresher plays that seem serious and important.

What do you do when you come home and find out your wife and stepson are, as the gossips say, an item? That’s the domestic dilemma of the Greek hero-king Theseus, who’s been gone so long everybody thinks he’s dead.

Last month PBS ran a solemn documentary about TV comedies, and the announcer gravely intoned that Jackie Gleason “invented a new art form: the situation comedy.” That claim is most credible, of course, when you find some way to discredit ...

Maybe the most-watched black-and-white movie today, It’s a Wonderful Life was the first movie ever available on home video, and still gets shown on network TV. If you don’t get enough of it at home, the original movie was shown ...

"Woyzeck" arrives at the University of Tennessee’s Carousel Theatre with a strange pedigree. Georg Buchner, a political writer and ineffectual revolutionary in 1830s Germany, died of typhus at age 23, leaving unfinished this peculiar drama about a paranoid wife-killer. Something ...

The Woman-Power play in America dates from the 1980s, when Crimes of the Heart and Steel Magnolias were being performed in every little theater across the country. The Hallelujah Girls is definitely in the same gene pool.