Reviews

Starmaker Premiere At Island City Brings Back Old Hollywood

Starmaker, getting its world premiere at Island City Stage, is about Henry Willson, the agent behind the hunky male stars of the 1950s, who, while fooling the cameras as straight sex symbols, are hiding their biggest secret: they’re all gay, notably Rock Hudson.

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Lightning Bolt’s Showcases Hair’s Best & Worst Tendencies

Hair is a weird show, and not because the characters are weird. To the contrary, the flower children of the Vietnam era, which it explores with both affection and criticism, have arguably aged more into the mainstream after decades of the liberalization of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and new age spirituality. Hair is strange because of the shambolic structure , as neither a fully sung-through musical nor a traditional, book-driven story.

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Report From New York: Tootsie Has Own Vibe, Not Copy Of Film

The creators of Tootsie, a Broadway musical destined to tour near you , made a brilliant and courageous choice to abandon duplicating the 1982 Sydney Pollack film starring Dustin Hoffman, and produce a fresh take on the same idea.

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Men On Boats — All Played By Women — Is A Goofball Pageant, Not A Feminist Manifesto

Main Street Players’ tongue-in-cheek production of Men On Boats — in which women portray the male explorers of the Colorado River — is basically a declamatory sixth grade history pageant merged with the broad humor of a Carol Burnett skit, blue language, and rarely a wink’s acknowledgment of the change in gender casting.

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Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew Is GableStage Benchmark Triumph

Amid a constellation of superb theater from GableStage comes a supernova of passion, pain and socio-political protest in a scorching drama Skeleton Crew. Its portrayal of African-American workers in a Detroit auto plant teetering on closing incisively examines racial issues that intensify impending tragedy, but also a world evaporating under our feet whuch crosses all demographic boundaries.

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Murder For Two Is a Welcome Summer Farce At Playhouse

As in troubling days in the past, once again farce provides a welcome dose of mindless zaniness that even the real life actors on the world stage cannot not equal. Add the musical mystery Murder For Two as two gifted clowns cavort at Actors’ Playhouse in a manic mélange of kinetic physical comedy, wacky wordplay and unrestrained supreme silliness.

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She Shorts Is Female-Centric, But Message Is For Everyone

Alright ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, she’s and he’s, and those who would prefer not to self-identify, Thinking Cap Theatre and City Theatre’s summer short play fest, She Shorts is for you, so that means everybody.

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Percy Jackson Musical The Lightning Thief Mixes Young Adult Classic With Rock Vibe

Theatreworks USA’s touring production of The Lightning Thief is what results from mixing a young adult classic with a rock concert vibe à la Rent: a sometimes intense, yet always laid back feel-good romp that will leave audiences wishing that they, too, had a Greek god as a parent.

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Uplifting Come From Away Is Season’s Don’t Miss Highlight

Even writing about it the next day, the warmth still glows. In this time, to quote a lyric from another show, “of cold and darkness, in this terrifying night,” the affirmation of basic human decency engendered by the national tour of Come From Away stays comfortably nestled inside, nurturing hope for the future.

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Jolt Productions’ First Musical Is Winning ‘The Wedding Singer’

The Wedding Singer musical is a lively winning goofball vibe poking good-natured fun at that geological era known as “The ‘80s” in the inaugural offering of Jolt Productions, a professional company in Boca Raton.

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