Stage
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Tough Lessons
When Ernest J. Gaines' novel A Lesson Before Dying was published in 1993 it found fast fame. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, awarded a National...
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Full House
What's so enthralling about Synetic Theater's production of The Fall of the House of Usher, is how thoroughly it braids conventional theater with dance and...
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Happy Accident
Imagine this: you're shaving your legs in a bathtub. You slip and fall. Somehow, during the slip, the razor meets your wrists. There's blood everywhere,...
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All My Children
www.studiotheatre.org Black vs. white. Man vs. woman. Teacher vs. pupil. Self defense vs. murder. Rock vs. dictionary. These dichotomies and others cleave fissures through Athol...
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Plum Roll
First of all, the answer is yes. This is the one that goes backwards. Which means that Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along is not...
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Living Testament
Talking to Bruce Ward about his play, Lazarus Syndrome, is like navigating a minefield -- albeit one in which you long to step on the...
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Compulsive Obsession
When is an obsession a good thing? When it's in the hands of a genius like Beethoven. Or, in the case of 33 Variations, when...
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American Values
If you polled the typical Woolly Mammoth audience you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that: 1) American Christian missionaries who go to...
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Barbed Wire
All's fair in love and war. And for playwright Noel Coward, that extends to marriage and laughter. Verbal warfare abounds in Coward's classic, Private Lives,...
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Silent Weapon
Some shows are almost impossible to review. This isn't because they are bad plays. In fact, those are actually the easiest to work with. There...
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Naked Ambition
Jose Carrasquillo's interpretation of Macbeth at the Washington Shakespeare Company, a production where the full cast is nude for the entirety of the play, has...
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Phantom Menace
Phantom of the Opera is today what it has always been: part circus, part carnival-ride, part made-for-TV movie. It is a sumptuous feast for the...
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Witch Slapped
It was probably one of those ideas followed by the exclamation, ''That's so crazy it just might work!'' Don't simply create a stage version of...
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Preening in Denmark
Since everyone pretty much knows the deal with Hamlet, the only question is if the Shakespeare Theatre Company's current production is the interpretation for you....
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Duly Noted
LONG BEFORE American Idol-reject William Hung garnered his 15 minutes of fame for his awful renditions of pop songs, Florence Foster Jenkins was selling out...
