Culture Vulture
After seeing many flat and boring adaptations of books over the past year, I recommend director Piotr Fomenko’s playful adaptation of Tolstoy’s Family Happiness to writers and directors wanting to turn literature into drama.
The Lyric Stage actors and pianist Catherine Stornetta do an excellent job making all of “33 Variations” intelligible and, sometimes, very funny.
Director Meg Taintor’s demands on her five young actors – three women and two men — are very high, requiring not only daring, but physical stamina and skill, dance training, mime training, fight training, and musicianship as well as dramatic power.
Instead of exploring his inner life at the time or his adult understanding of the institution that shelters him, Ngũgi wa Thiong’o draws a dispassionate and largely predictable report of boarding school life.
“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” is hard to categorize. It is both funny and dead serious, not exactly a black comedy but an idiosyncratic composite of many different dramatic antecedents.
The pairing of food for the stomach and food for the soul made me think of the role of culture in extreme situations.
As Louis Armstrong, the gifted actor John Douglas Thompson is working with a script whose lines and contours are as woefully predictable as a profile in the old Life Magazine.
A 19th-century Russian masterpiece presented in a translation and a production whose mishmash of style distorts the play and confuses both actors and audiences.
Why did Chester Theatre Company’s Artistic Director Byam Stevens choose such a banal, lazily-written play with no drama, no development, barely any interesting language, and none of the wit, charm or whimsy I’ve come to associate with this stage company?
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