Stages, Theater

Review: Heartache Overshadows Black Lives in Milwaukee Rep’s Seven Guitars

Black history month may be over but, in Milwaukee, a perspective of Black lives is offered this month in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars. Milwaukee Repertory Theater, in conjunction with Cincinnati […]

Anne Siegel /
Stages, Theater

Review: Timeline Theatre Company Gives New Life to Trouble in Mind, a Classic in Our Racist History

I always look forward to Timeline Theatre productions because the company provides the background and history of the play in a lobby display and in the playbill. Ron OJ Parson […]

Kathy D. Hey /
Stages, Theater

Review: Court Theatre’s Arsenic and Old Lace Serves Up a Mild Cocktail

Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 Arsenic and Old Lace is a familiar property, frequently revived and indelibly captured on film in Frank Capra’s 1944 movie starring Cary Grant. Its popularity is well […]

Doug Mose /
Stages, Theater

Review: Court Theatre’s Two Trains Running Cannonballs Home

There are two ways to tell history: the Big Men, Big Events timeline that Henry Ford once called “just one damn thing after another” and a more involving, intimate option […]

Doug Mose /
Stages, Theater

Review: Timeline Theatre’s Relentless Unburies the Past to Confront the Future

Bakari and Ladymore are brilliant as sisters. Annelle is the dilettante who has had two marriages before finding Marcus. She revels in being a doctor’s wife as much as being […]

Kathy D. Hey /
Stages, Theater

Review: Family, Friendships and Lives on the Line in Goodman’s Stellar Staging of Sweat

Sweat

If you go into a performance of Sweat, the two-act drama by Lynn Nottage on now at the Goodman Theatre, without knowing much at all about the plot or setting, […]

Lisa Trifone /
Stages, Theater

Review: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, August Wilson’s Essential Chicago Masterpiece, Sings at Writers Theatre

August Wilson famously tackled the entirety of the 20th century with his poetic works of human tragedy and mythic resilience. Wilson’s plays like to live in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood […]

Matthew Nerber /