Joffrey Ballet Dances ‘Anna Karenina’
How do you fit an 800-page Russian classic into a night's ballet? Throw a lot of ballroom dances. There has been a couple of attempts to make Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"…
Stage: Getting Involved in ‘The Nosebleed’
Aya Ogawa never had a memorial service after their father died. So there's one every night in "The Nosebleed," Ogawa's unusually involving Obie-winning play getting its regional premiere at Woolly…
The Kansas City Ballet’s Own Nutcracker
Like the growing Christmas tree, the grand Tchaikovsky score and the sparkle on the snow queens, there are certain things audiences expect from their annual viewing of "The Nutcracker," and…
Stage: ‘Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci’
Leonardo Da Vinci predated William Shakespeare by half a century; their paths never crossed. Both were artists who changed the world with their vision; each had flinty intellects interested in…
Stage: Back to the ’50s in ‘Maple and Vine’
Even as patrons file in Spooky Action’s basement theater space at the Universalist National Memorial Church, the central couple of the new production “Maple and Vine” are already on stage…
Theatre Review: ‘A Boy and His Soul’
This is the 50th anniversary year for Philadelphia International Records, the outfit founded by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff that gave us, among many other things, "TSOP (The Sound of…
The Bengsons’ ‘Joy is Heavy!’ for Arena
As we enter the second year of pandemic, theater companies have largely shifted from live performance spaces to film and video producers. When new work is offered, it streams online,…
Live Theater Returns in a Plexiglass Box
The big drama of The GALA Hispanic Theatre’s season opener “El Perro del Hortelano (The Dog in the Manger)” is that they’re presenting it at all. It’s the first indoor…
A Slight Kennedy Center Reopening
If you were planning the first in-person performance in the Kennedy Center in six months, a kind of historic cultural awakening after the darkness of the pandemic lockdown, you couldn’t…
Theater Review: Hang Up and Dial Again
The pandemic shutdown, now entering its seventh catastrophic month, has necessitated a certain creativity if any theater at all is to be produced or consumed. Mostly, this has been through…