There are stories so true and yet so bleak that many people don’t really want to hear them. Life Without Parole is one of these. Yet the play, produced by Working Artists Theatre Project in association with Karah Gravatt and Robert Tyrer and presente …Read more

In his show Hoaxocaust!, now playing at the New York International Fringe Festival, writer and performer Barry Levey satirizes the arguments of Holocaust deniers like Arthur Butz, David Irving, Robert Faurisson, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while also as …Read more

Last week, I had the pleasure of reviewing Lisa Flanagan’s one-woman Fringe Festival show La Donna Improvvisata. In it, Flanagan improvises a 60-minute opera with nothing but her wits and a pianist, and does so effortlessly. I strongly recommend chec …Read more

In the mid-1920’s the Marx Brothers were perhaps the most celebrated entertainers in the United States, after a successful career in vaudeville they transitioned to Broadway where they continued making people laugh with their combination of surreal, …Read more

Based on the brilliant cult documentary of the same name, King of Kong is a charming musical parody in which two performers (Amber Ruffin & Lauren Van Kurin who also wrote the show) play unlikely rivals Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe respectively …Read more

As I watched Mohammad Rahmanian’s play Interview at the New York International Fringe Festival, I was reminded of the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. I saw the latter years ago, and was haunted by the intense images director Gillo Pontecorvo used to …Read more

I had the pleasure of catching the very impressive Lisa Flanagan this week in La Donna Improvvisata, a show that makes improvising an entire one-person opera look remarkably easy. It begins with Flanagan asking the audience to choose an opera charact …Read more

When the popular British comedienne Margaret Rutherford was cast as Agatha Christie’s brilliant amateur detective Miss Jane Marple for a series of British movies in the 1960s she wasn’t quite sure she wanted the job. And Christie wasn’t quite sure sh …Read more

Vestments of the Gods should have been made as a stop motion film in the vein of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Paranorman and this is nothing if not a compliment; for the way in which Owen Panettieri’s sophisticated musical combines the macabre …Read more

  Lancelot: The brave knight of King Arthur’s Round Table who had an adulterous affair with Queen Guinevere, then rescued her from the stake when she was about to be burned for treason. Ryan: The youngest manager of a store named United Goods in …Read more