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Theater Review: Soul Crooners 2
When it comes to presenting musical revues, Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe has it down to a formula: Kick off the evening with lots of energy and keep it coming, pack the show with hits most people in the audience will remember and sway along to, and oh, yes—have the cast members sing directly to the [...]
Read More >>Theater Review: “Stop Kiss”
By Kay Kipling Part of the purpose of the FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s MFA training program is to prepare its students for all types of acting and all types of roles, which sometimes requires them to portray characters quite a bit older than they are. That can be a challenge for them and interesting for the audience, [...]
Read More >>Theater Review: 9 to 5
Eve Caballero, Nancy Denton, Alana Opie and George Naylor. Despite its impressive pedigree—the very popular 1980 film that inspired it—9 to 5 the Musical didn’t get a lot of respect from New York critics when it played on Broadway in 2009. That’s probably not too surprising; this show, with music and lyrics by the [...]
Read More >>Theater Review: Florida Studio Theatre’s “The Columnist”
By Kay Kipling Depending on your age and your interest in politics, you may or may not remember the name Joseph Alsop—the real-life title character of Florida Studio Theatre’s current production, The Columnist, by David Auburn. For years he was a feared and much-followed journalist whose column was syndicated widely, and he wielded significant power [...]
Read More >>Theater Review: “The Heidi Chronicles”
By Kay Kipling Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, about art historian Heidi Holland coming of age from the 1960s to the 1980s, touched a chord with many viewers when it first bowed in the late 1980s—and took home both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize, too. With its often funny, often touching look at the [...]
Read More >>Theater Review: “Anything Goes”
By Kay Kipling If the production of Anything Goes currently onstage at the Manatee Players Riverfront Theatre seems a little different from the way you remember it, don’t worry. This Cole Porter musical has undergone a number of changes since it first bowed in 1934—a shifting around of songs and relationships, a rewriting of some [...]
Read More >>Theater Review: The Players’ “Sunset Boulevard”
By Kay Kipling How do you make a musical version of such an iconic Hollywood film as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard? It certainly takes confidence on the part of the composer, and Andrew Lloyd Webber has never been short of that. His version of Sunset, with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, [...]
Read More >>Theater Review: Asolo Rep’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”
By Kay Kipling It’s certainly no coincidence that the music leading us into the curtain rise for the Asolo Rep‘s Glengarry Glen Ross is jazz. The dialogue between the characters of this David Mamet play comes off like jazz; it’s as if these people are improvising, riffing off what one of them says and bouncing [...]
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