We hear the notes of a piano followed by an announcement, “ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to see is real magic”, exclaims Avi Leiter (Travis Stuebing) before adding, “but don’t despair, it’s still just a trick”. With the playfully ominous t …Read more

Derek Ahonen’s The Qualification of Douglas Evans is a modern take on the morality play that feels like 8 ½ by way of Days of Wine and Roses. As in Blake Edwards’ 1962 film (based on a teleplay by JP Miller), Ahonen presents us with characters full o …Read more

Mark Roberts’ Enter at Forest Lawn is a play that examines the darkest confines of human nature through the prism of the entertainment industry. Set inside the cavernous office of megalomaniac television producer Jack Story (Mark Roberts), the show c …Read more

A few minutes into The Long Shrift, Robert Boswell’s new play at the Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre, and Sarah and Henry, a middle aged couple, are in the midst of what is surely not their first argument over their son, barely out of high school an …Read more

About midway through the opening number of Academia Nuts, you will think: “It’s A Chorus Line for nerds.” Here’s a collective of kids hell-bent on giving their all to win, not a dancing gig, but a scholarship; surely the songs and confessions of pers …Read more

In Feather Gatherers, presented at The New Ohio Theatre as a part of the Ice Factory Festival, Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin, along with The Drunkard’s Wife, their troupe of actors, dancers, and musicians, remind us that sometimes the best sto …Read more

Set in exotic Yucatán on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, The Mapmaker’s Opera is a dramatic adaptation (of a novel by Béa Gonzalez) that has more in common with a telenovela than with the art form mentioned in its title. Not that there is anything …Read more

If it has ever seemed to you that the typical “coming of age” trope is getting a bit stale, then Jon Provan’s two hour anthology of adolescent growth and development will revive your interest in the genre. In Coming of Age, simplistic, yet powerful d …Read more

While we all read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in high school, few of us ever experience life imitating art. Such is the case in Brian Sutton’s Searching For Romeo, now at the Alice Griffin Jewel Bow Theatre as part of the New York Musical Theatre …Read more

Why write a play about Ethel Rosenberg, you may ask? We already know the ending (spoiler alert: she dies); and we all know the evils of McCarthyism, but it’s old news, a relic of the fifties. But Joan Beber’s new play, Ethel Sings: The Unsung Song of …Read more