Brown University’s annual Writing is Live festival will be held February 5 through the 11. The event allows playwrights to showcase their unfinished work for audiences. “Each performance day has a different reading or workshop of a new play from one of the playwrights in our MFA playwriting program,” said Brianne Shaw, marketing and box […]
The “outrageous cosmic comedy,” American Strippers, by Rhode Island’s own Kevin Broccoli, received its world premiere as the final production of Epic Theatre Company’s 2015 season. It’s a bawdy but intelligent fantasy, where Greek goddesses throw a bachelorette party for Aphrodite in a Texas strip club run by American legends such as Pecos Bill and […]
My colleague Kevin Broccoli recently pronounced theater criticism dead: “You’re better off hiring 50 20-year-olds to talk about your show on social media than you are cozying up to a Motif contributor on opening night.” (“Let’s Talk About Critics,” Jan 10). He cites “an army of straight, white, male critics” whose perspective makes them less […]
Down With Love: A Cabaret will be presented on February 16 at the Common Fence Point Hall in Portsmouth. Jeff Blanchette and Rachel Hanauer will be performing jazz standards, musical theater and pop. “Jeff and I wanted to perform again at the Common Fence Point Hall, specifically to fundraise for some theater arts equipment,” Hanauer […]
“This isn’t a sex play — it’s not an S&M play — that’s way too simple a frame for how smart it actually is. That’s just the entry point.” – Kate Kataja, director of Venus in Fur, BTC Playwright David Ives’ tango of sexual tension, Venus in Fur, succeeds on paper precisely because it’s not […]
For the 20th year, the RI Black Storytellers hosted and produced a Liar’s Competition on January 19 as part of FUNDA Fest, sometimes referred to as RIBS’ Fibs. The event was hosted by April Brown and Teju Ologboni, and played to a standing-room-only crowd at the Mixed Magic Theater at 560 Mineral Spring Ave in Pawtucket. […]
Whether by divine plan or just cosmic joke, the local theater stars have aligned this January to offer audiences the perfect companion piece to The Gamm Theatre’s much lauded new adaptation of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. This “super moon” of theatrical events comes in the form of a wonderfully staged and phenomenally acted production of […]
The hit musical On Your Feet will be presented at Providence Performing Arts Center from January 30 through February 4. On Your Feet tells the inspiring story of pop music superstar Gloria Estefan, who with her husband, Emilio, was responsible for several hits in the 1980s and ’90s, including “1-2-3,” “Conga,” “Rhythm Is Gonna Get […]
Starting with a breezy, witty and emphatically modern Russian-to-English translation by director Curt Columbus, the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre production of Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov is a darkly comic and cerebral delight. It could be the best production of Uncle Vanya you’re ever likely to see. One of the epic dysfunctional families of drama slowly […]
Playwright Lillian Hellman was an awful person: Self-hating Jew, apologist for Stalin, plagiarist of the lives of other people, possessed of a remarkable talent for alienating friends, and prone to ruinous litigation. Hellman, perhaps because of her own deep character flaws, mastered an uncanny empathy in writing plays about awful people. Being evil is not […]