Tom Stoppard's On the Razzle is a classic mistaken-identity, disapproving-parent, jealous-pursuit romp turned up a few notches. It’s like a long Marx Brothers routine, with about a dozen Marx Brothers, and no musical breaks.

“You’re so odd but we love you still,” goes a refrain in the opening number of Flying Anvil’s new musical production. The endearment is directed, of course, at the city of Knoxville, and expresses our sentiments exactly.

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress was first mentioned in these pages back in the ’90s. Back then, we’d heard rumors of a wacky off-Broadway comedy that happened to be set in Knoxville. We never made the trip to see ...

The drama plays out as a very animated dialogue between the late-middle-aged Rothko, at the peak of his ca. 1960 vogue, and a (fictional) young assistant named Ken. The main context is Rothko’s famous challenge to decorate the walls of ...

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.