Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member. The first time I ever saw Yasmina Reza’s Art (translated by Christopher Hampton) it blew me away. The complications that arise when one of three best friends buys a piece of expensive art that consists of a white canvass made for compelling theatre, especially once you […]
Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo credit to come. In an era when the very nature of the words “reality,” “truth,” and “fact” seems to change with the perception of the observer, it’s sometimes not all that easy to tell what is going on. Imagine how much more that must be […]
Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Paul Goyette. “Please turn off your cell phones now.” Every theatrical performance begins with those words or something similar, but who hasn’t been in a theatre when, probably at some quiet, crucial moment, someone’s cell phone has gone off? We are left to hang […]
Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Michael Brosilow. There is simply no better director alive for interpreting the works of August Wilson than Ron OJ Parson, who has opened his 26th such interpretation with Writers Theatre’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the 1920s edition of the playwright’s American Century Cycle. Parson […]
Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Austin D. Oie. Rifts between fathers and sons have long been fodder for drama as well as comedy, and both are present in abundance in Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s The Total Bent, a musical now being presented at the Den Theatre by Haven Theatre […]
Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Michael Brosilow. The word “pedophilia” is used once, and only once, in Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive, now playing at the Raven Theatre, but the topic of pedophilia pervades this play that is somehow terribly creepy, powerfully poignant, and hilariously […]
Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Michael Courier. Take the revenge fantasy of Sweeney Todd and blend it with the silliness and absurd comedy of The Mystery of Edward Drood and you might have something like A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, the wonderfully engaging and entertaining musical now […]
Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Liz Lauren. “Creation is hard work.” That thought is at the core of How to Catch Creation by Christina Anderson. Whether one is creating a book, a painting, a relationship, or a family, creation takes time, patience, and focus…or perhaps it takes marvelous serendipity. […]
By Beverly Friend, Member American Theater Critics Assn. Anyone who has never seen Mel Brooks brilliant classic, The Producers, in film or on stage should be sure to see the latest production at Stage Door Theater. This is a landmark experience – theater telling a story about theater – a real groundbreaker in 1968 and ever since. […]
Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Michael Brosilow. Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler, now playing at the Court Theatre, has a difficult task: rendering complex scientific research as tragedy. The play concerns the pioneering work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin, whose King’s College x-ray photographs of DNA (particularly one labeled Photo […]