Imagine a world where Catholic schoolboys just becoming aware of their sexuality and sexual identity choose to spend their off-hours reading and privately performing Shakespeare rather than playing sports or locking themselves in the bathroom with pornography. Improbable? Absolutely. But it's the world in which Shakespeare's R+J, playwright Joe Calarco's adaptation of what is possibly the world's most famous love story, is set. And produced by Mauckingbird Theatre Company under the direction of Peter......

I have to be honest here for a minute: I was pretty pessimistic about The Walnut's production of Les Miserables, more or less from the second it was announced as the season closer. It wasn't lack of faith in The Walnut that led to my lack of optimism. Rather, it was a familiarity: nothing about Les Mis—not the music, not the costumes, not the set*—is easy, and bad productions are far too common. Not......

I remember wondering, when I read Thornton Wilder's Our Town in high school, how the play could possibly be interesting when staged. The script calls for no set, no props, and minimal scenery. It's something that only sometimes works in modern (as opposed to "Modern") theatre, so the idea of a play written in the thirties that takes place between 1901–1913 and uses the type of set typically reserved for performance art was, I'll......

Once in a while, you'll hear the Philadelphia Theatre Company criticized for "playing it safe"—choosing plays or casting actors that will fill seats, and sacrificing quality in the process. I will neither agree nor disagree with that statement, but I will pose this question: if PTC always plays it safe, how can you explain The Happiness Lecture? The show, now in its final two weeks, can only be described as performance art. It's not laughable......

Students of classical studies take note: if you're heading to The Wilma Theater for some good old fashioned Greek mythology, prepare to be surprised. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless. Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice, now onstage at The Wilma, isn't just a revisionist retelling of the story of Orpheus's ill-fated wife. It's a complete re-imagining of the tale. One in which Eurydice, typically the silent, ill-fated object of Orpheus's love, takes centerstage. The concept smacks of......

Let me just begin this review by saying, simply, that there are only five performances of Azuka Theatre's production of John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch left, and that you should make sure you're at one of them. Dito van Reigersberg, best known to most of Philadelphia as Miss Martha Graham Cracker, was positively born to play this role. It's not just because he likes to sing and dance wearing a dress. It's......

You know that kid at your middle school who was always EXCITED for your once-monthly library day? Yeah, that was me. Which is how I ended up reading George Orwell's Animal Farm when I was eleven. The librarian looked at me in confusion when I brought it up to the check-out. My parents asked if I was sure I woldn't rather read another Nancy Drew book. (This was long before Harry Potter.) But I......

Note to our readers: The run of The Rivals was, unfortunately, quite short, so this review is running after the close of the show. That being said, we think it's important to let you know about the work being done by smaller theatre companies in the region so that you have an idea of what to look forward to at future productions. Restoration plays, such as those by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, aren't produced very often.......

When Third, playwright Wendy Wasserstein's swan song, first debuted in New York, it was met with largely tepid reviews. It seems as if many felt that Wasserstein's creative energy, once so true to life—both her own and more generally so—that it earned her the first Tony ever given to a female playwright, had fizzled with her prolonged bout with cancer. And to a degree, this is true: Third is not nearly so strong a script......

There's a reason that nobody really produces Pericles, one of Shakespeare's final plays. And that reason is, to put it bluntly, that Pericles is really stupid. Really stupid. Most directors, producers, and English teachers know this, accept it, and pretend that the play doesn't exist at all. And then there's The Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, which decided to revive this forgotten work, using a script developed and adapted by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that cleaned......

Let's just get this out on the table: producing Neil Simon's The Odd Couple is playing it safe. It's not that I don't love the play—I do—but so does everybody else. (Except for, I don't know, maybe August Strindberg, but he's dead and he doesn't count. On the other hand, Neil Simon might quite enjoy Strindberg and Helium.) And so just putting the play up on your marquee or season brochure is more or less......

I used to be a dancer. I even used to choreograph a little. And oh! how I loved to create pieces to confound the audience: straightforward stories told so abstractly that it would take an advanced degree in philosophy to understand what the dancers were doing on the stage. The audience could like it fine, love it even—they just wouldn't really know what was going on. My penchant for abstraction in my own choreography......

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that if you're directing a dialect-heavy piece, be it the thick Irish brogue required for one of Martin McDonagh's Connemara trilogy, or the crisp English accents of an Oscar Wilde play, or even the southern dialect accent used in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, now onstage at the Arden Theatre Company, you should give your audience a moment or two to get used to the difference in speech......

"Hmmm..." you may be saying to yourself. "A one-act musical centered around a group therapy session? How good could that possibly be?" Answer: Pretty damn good. Have a Nice Life, Nice People Theatre Company's current production under the direction of Bill Felty and musical direction of Rob Blackwell, is an unlikely musical, but a solid one. Very rarely self-indulgent (which, let's face it, therapy often is), the show is surprisingly conventional, if not in......

No doubt about it: Tennessee Williams was one of the greatest writers whose work graced the Twentieth Century American stage. A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie are all plays we read in high school or college English and drama classes. They're oft-performed and there have been several movie versions produced of each. So with all the familiarity we as a collective culture have with these and other......

Most people, when finding out after surgery that their anesthesiologist had given them Sodium Pentathol prior to their operations because the doctors wanted "to find out something about the patient," and that as a result, they spoke for twelve minutes straight to the surgeons and scrub nurses, possibly revealing embarrassing or incriminating secrets about themselves, would have sued the hell out of the anesthesiologist, the surgeon, and the hospital. Deb Margolin, however, wrote a......

I'm a bit of an Anglophile. I love British just-about-everything, except for the food. But I especially love British humor. And after attending and enjoying a staged reading of Roy Smiles' Ying Tong last spring, I figured I'd really love the fully-mounted production at The Wilma Theater. I never thought I'd say this about any production, ever, but I think I liked the staged reading better. There was something charming about the bare-bones production......

Entering the empty stage, David Ford began to shake his maracas into the microphone. He stepped away and lowered the maracas, but, as if it was somehow coming from behind the scenes, the sound continued to echo. He then briefly vocalized into the mic and -- same as the maracas -- after the vocalization was over, it eerily continued. At this point, hushed murmurs throughout the crowd could be heard: "What is he doing?" "How......

'Twas the Sunday after Valentine's Day and all through the World Cafe Live, folks were stirring about, probably even mice. A familiar face graced the stage to prepare the audience for the night's headlining act. It was none other than Dawn Landes. Her weapon of choice varies (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, piano). Her songs, though, remain the same. At times upbeat and hopeful; at times, introspective and hopeless. She's touring the country in support of......

There's no question that the puppets are extraordinary, both in execution and handling. The acting, too, leaves nothing to be desired. But there's something about Mum Puppettheatre's production of The Master and Margarita that's just... too much. It was nothing short of ambitious for Mum to mount director Adrienne Mackey's adaptation of the now-classic Mikhail Bulgakov Russian novel, and perhaps therein lies the problem. With twenty major characters worthy of mention on the book's Wikipedia......

Typically, theatre is escapist. We go to be entertained, to see the lives of others played out for a few hours, to leave satisfied. What we are viewing is fantasy, not reality. Once in a while, though, theatre challenges us, and we find ourselves in the audience not, it feels, watching a play, but rather watching the very real lives of very real people having very real conversations and doing very real things. It's......

At its best, Milcha Sanchez-Scott's Roosters is a charming (albeit dark) family drama that addresses coming of age, socioeconomic status, and tradition. At its worst, Roosters is everything that gives performance art a bad name. The Theatre Exile production currently being mounted at the Christ Church Neighborhood House has an excellent cast that is more than capable of handling the challenges that the script presents. Joe Guzmán plays Gallo, recently released from jail and......

For this Phillyist, Friday night's Cat Power show left something to be desired. The sold out Starlight Ballroom was buzzing with anticipation as the audience waited for Chan Marshall to take the stage. Standing around waiting in the sweat-soaked heat, I found myself thinking that I wouldn't have minded the heat and the moisture and the stink so much if this were The Greatest Cat Power. Jukebox Cat Power, not so much. To me the......

Two literary characters and a historical figure walk into a bar... It's not a joke – it's the basic premise of Wittenberg, a world premiere play currently running at the Arden Theatre. Wittenberg is a play for smart people, full of historical and literary references used, often, in very funny ways. Not well-versed on your Elizabethan drama or your Sixteenth Century religious history? Well, you can still enjoy the play, but you won't get......

The Price is a play by Arthur Miller, which pretty much means it's about half an hour too long and a little dated, especially when you get to talking money (which, let's face it, most of his characters outside of The Crucible do). That being said, when you can embrace the fact that this is what you get from Arthur Miller, you have to admit that he's a helluva writer. There's a reason that his......

I showed up at Mauckingbird Theatre Company's The Misanthrope with a combination of excitement and trepidation. Excitement because I love Molière and Dito van Reigersberg. Trepidation because an all-male production of a French farce? I expected half the cast to be in outrageous Marie Antoinette-like drag costumes. It's not that I don't love a good drag show – it's just that I didn't see that combining it with Molière would be anything less than......

Tap dancing! Martial arts! Fire swallowing! S&M! Is it the latest show by the Peek-A-Boo Revue? No. It's the Lantern Theater Company's revival production of The Screwtape Letters, adapted from the book by C.S. Lewis by, and starring, Anthony Lawton. As with all of C.S. Lewis's works, Screwtape has a decidedly Christian slant— in this case, speaking on the ideas of faith and morality, and how their abandonment could mean eternal damnation— but the story......

by Debbie Foster Trying new restaurants is something that my husband and I love to do, so when I saw that a new Thai restaurant had opened up in our neighborhood, I co-opted my husband, parents, sister and son to go and try it out. My official opinion: yummy, yummy, more, more. Kao Tip, located in NE Philadelphia (on Cottman Avenue just off of Frankford avenue) is an encouraging addition to the culinary palate of......

Many, many moons ago, this Phillyist spent her college years carousing through the mean streets of Pittsburgh. As anyone knows, a good carousing needs a soundtrack, and in Pittsburgh, the soundtrack was invariably the music of The Clarks. When we discovered that The Clarks were due to play World Cafe Live last Sunday, we jumped at the chance to attend the show. Our plus one, however, had never (sadly) heard of the band and asked......

Every weekday of December (except for December 25, that is), Phillyist will be counting down to 2008 with our highlights from the past year and our predictions for the next. If you have a list you'd like to submit, let us know! You guys picked the items in this list - which made this post a lot easier to write! And we thank you for that, because we're really kind of burning out on this......