The Lion King opened on Broadway 20 years ago, and I have spent the last two decades rolling my eyes at the thought and never felt the need to buy tickets. As a huge Disney fan, I have to admit that The Lion King has never been a favorite of mine. Sure I loved the music […]
Apparently, a rose by any other name really would smell as sweet … metaphorically speaking. In this case, the rose was not Juliet, but rather, her Romeo, who happened to be portrayed by an actress named Victoria. Directed by Ted Clement, the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) Players’ take on Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and […]
Providence’s ever-challenging OUT LOUD Theatre spent last year exploring the public domain, with material such as Dracula and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus free to use, develop and interpret at will. The result was a grab bag of vision, sound and fury that often reached further into some of the material than any imagined possible. For 2017, artistic […]
Providence ¡CityArts! is serving as community partner with Brown University’s Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies for their production of In the Heights. The show will be presented March 2 – 12 at Stuart Theatre on the main campus. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights tells the story of a vibrant Cuban, Dominican and Puerto […]
Dance audiences have no reason for lamentations this spring with plenty of contemporary dance events happening in and around Providence. Get your DVR ready, because you’ll have to sit on the couch during some other season. You’ll be too busy going out to see all these live performances to get in that kind of screen […]
With many anxiously awaiting the spring thaw, area ballet companies are gearing up for the home stretch before closing their curtains for a well-deserved summer break. Leading the way, following a critically acclaimed and groundbreaking world premiere of Romeo and Juliet that combined dance with the spoken word, is Festival Ballet Providence. They get things […]
The United States is home to only 5% of the world’s population, yet houses 25% of the world’s prisoners. Why do we lock up so many of our own citizens? That question came to mind during Brown/Trinity Rep.’s production of Our Country’s Good, which is set in an Australian penal colony in 1788. The prisoners […]
Around the World in 80 Days is a stage version of what is very likely the most popular novel by Jules Verne, the prolific 19th century grandfather of technological fiction, by which I mean fiction dependent upon and heavily influenced by then-current or just slightly futuristic technology as distinguished from science-fiction that is more speculative. The […]
I love seeing Shakespeare, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is by far my favorite of all of the Bard’s pieces. If there’s a production of it nearby, I have to attend — including 20 years ago when Trinity Rep performed it. As with most Shakespeare I’ve caught at Trinity Rep, the production stayed with me. Fast […]
Murder at the Howard Johnson’s tries to be a nostalgic look back to the late 1970s when leisure suits, the sexual revolution and proto-New Age gurus were the thing, but as a relic actually written in 1979 and set in 1978 it never achieves the necessary distance needed for genuine reflection. People did a lot of […]