If the children of Scientologists in their youthful innocence performed a stage musical in the mode of a Christmas pageant about their religious movement that has driven people to bankruptcy and suicide, complete with cheesy cardboard props and scenery, the result would presumably be this black humor extravaganza. The satire consists largely in simply exhibiting […]
Mixed Magic Theatre delivers Othello in its classic form Shakespeare was a rather good playwright. We tend to forget that amidst modern interpretations of the sort done by Kenneth Branagh or Joss Whedon. Trinity Rep a few years ago put on Hamlet as if it was an episode of Downton Abbey. One film version of […]
Summers are all-too-brief periods into which are packed memories of events that later may only dimly be remembered and even more dimly understood, no matter how much people are changed by them: Breakfast with Curtis is a film about such a summer. Providence native Laura Colella serves as director, writer and cinematographer of a visually […]
Doubt as a philosophical concept has a bad reputation in traditional religion, and its advocates have tended to be heretics and apostates. Voltaire, one of history’s most famous agnostics, said, “Doubt is disagreeable but certainty is ridiculous.” Rarely has that aphorism been more eloquently expressed than in John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt: A Parable, a […]
Epic Theatre Company offers a black comedy by Martin McDonagh Cutting off hands evokes numerous metaphorical allusions beyond inherent squeamishness, ranging from the Gospel of Matthew to Llamas with Hats, but it’s puzzling what playwright Martin McDonagh intends by introducing us in his opening scene to Carmichael (Dave Pizzelli), who has not only been looking […]
Obscure for all of his life and only slightly less obscure for decades after his death in 1937, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, like one of his fictional creatures, quietly waited under the earth of Swan Point Cemetery in Providence for an auspicious time when the author’s reputation, if not the author himself, would re-emerge. Presciently […]
The Contemporary Theater Company (CTC) lives up to its name with 2013 summer-season opener Fuddy Meers, written in 1999 as a first professional work by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. Unlike his more well-known 2006 Rabbit Hole that won a Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a film, Fuddy Meers is a genre-defying black comedy and domestic […]
By Michael Bilow I greatly enjoyed Epic Theatre Company’s performance of Alice in Wonderland, a version of Lewis Carroll’s classic created by The Manhattan Project, and even saw it a second time. It’s not at all for everyone, though. The Andre Gregory/Manhattan Project model is at the edge of experimental theater; it’s probably the most […]