Living or dead, family is family. And when you’re an Addams, you do what Addams’ do or… die! And you’ll want to be an Addams and be a part of their creepy-kooky-mysterious-ookey-all-together-spooky good time up at Tidewater Players this spring. Bringing the dark comedy, which is filled with surprising heart and a deep sense of familial ties to their stage, Tidewater Players is delivering The Addams Family musical with their own special spin.
HISstory is about to get overthrown! You may think you know their stories…
Divorced… Beheaded… Died… Divorced… Beheaded… Survived…
But you’re getting HERstory tonight (and every night through May 14th 2023) as Six the Broadway smash-sensation musical lands at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre! They are so much more than just six wives… of Henry VIII. They are a company of true triple-threat talent that will have you jumping to your feet,
All Shook Up is one of the fantastically fun, fluffy, and flashy hallmarks of the early-to-mid 2000’s big jukebox musicals, and it’s difficult not to come away from the show with some burnin’ love and a couple of jiggly-wiggly, hip-shaking moves made just for your best pair of blue suede shoes. The show originally debuted on Broadway in 2005 with a 6-month run, and it features a cross-section of intermingled love stories in a small mid-western 1950’s town told to the iconic music of The King (Elvis Presley,
Sing out for yourselves for you are blessed! Blessed to hear the stellar talent performing live on stage for the final production of the Children’s Playhouse of Maryland 2022/2023 season. Closing this season with a bang, their production of Jesus Christ Superstar is nothing short of stunning; it will give you chills, bring tears to your eyes, and make you thunder with applause by the time the show reaches its conclusion. Directed by Liz Boyer Hunnicutt,
From the very first millisecond of Barbara Khan’s The Lady was a Gentleman, I knew I was in for a wonderful treat! In an instant, the production begins and the audience is swept into an aura of light, and energy, and laughter. Led by a brief dumb show that allows the characters to take the stage and give a silent, yet physically over exaggerated sense of who they are, the production immediately becomes alive and allows for a fantastic transposition from the mundane world into the world of a St.
What does a divorcee look like? Zsa Zsa Gabor? Megan Markle? Elizabeth Taylor? How about a 19-year-old groovy chic from Los Angeles slumming it in a New York City apartment in the 60’s? That one fits the bill for Butterflies Are Free the 1969 play by Leonard Gershe (not to be confused with the 1972 film-adaptation starring Goldie Hawn.) Directed by Jason Crawford, this romantic-dramady tells the story of Don Baker, a young man living in his first solo apartment in New York City after fleeing his overbearing mother’s house in favor of newfound freedom.
When the play opens with the infamous “To be or not to be…” you start to think time is out of joint. Or maybe that you’ve just misremembered how Hamlet starts? You ever look at one of those maps of the United States where all the states have been shoved around into different spaces in the outline but it still mostly looks like the outline of the country even though everything is all discombobulated?
Welcome to Falsettoland! Where lovers come and go, and love is utterly blind. Rep Stage in Columbia closes its final season with a poignant and superb production of Falsettos. With Music and Lyrics by William Finn and Book by William Finn and James Lapine such a prolific piece of theater can remind you of the importance of love and friendship. You can clearly sense the passion and expertise that Director and Choreographer Joseph W.
When all the world is a hopeless jumble and the raindrops tumble all around… heaven opens up a magic lane. When all the clouds darken up the skyway, there’s a rainbow highway to be found, leading from your window pane… and rain did it ever this past weekend all over Charm City. And everywhere around it. If you’re wondering why you don’t recognize those lyrics as a part of the iconic “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” it’s because they weren’t included in the 1939 filmset that so many of us know and love.
It is the trial of the century! Every juicy piece of gossip you could imagine is wrapped up neatly, just waiting to be unraveled. There are men, women, and a strange woman. There are cops, judges, bailiffs, and animals. What? Animals? Yes, animals! In fact, some can even talk to them. Curious? Then you must see Doctor Dolittle being presented by The Salem Players.
Director Jen Sizer takes the ball to direct her first musical and delivers a touchdown.
“Magic only fades when it is forgotten.”
Magic has a special place in all of our hearts. It evokes wonder, awe, and a sense that even what should be logically impossible, can be possible. In a sense love is the same. It too evokes wonder, awe, and the sense that anything can be possible (even magical) with the power of love. But magic in the real world, at least the magic performed by real world stage magicians,
Every story is a love story. That’s the message being preached by Artistic Synergy of Baltimore’s (established 2012) production of AIDA which opened on a rainy night in Rosedale, MD. Based on the Italian language opera of the same name, Disney purchased the book rights in 1994 to turn it into an animated feature film. However, it was instead reborn as a Broadway musical with music by Sir Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice.
Put on some make-up! Go get your tickets! And watch her put the wig back on her head! Yes, that’s right, everyone of all genders, having conquered the great divide, Hedwig is coming for you! And not only is she coming— she’s HERE!! Dominion Stage is starting their 23rd Season with a tour du force production of John Cameron Mitchell & Stephen Trask’s Hedwig & The Angry Inch. Directed by Danni Guy with Musical Direction by David Smigielski &
Show them that it can be done! Build a prom for everyone! It’s Prom season, y’all. (Just like it used to be Les Miz season and Mamma Mia season?) Throwing their hat into the ring, Scottfield Theatre Company is building The Prom and it’s pretty spectacular. Directed by Chuck Hamrick, with Musical Direction by Nathan Scavilla, and Choreography by Becky Titelman, this inspiring new musical is making the rounds across the state,
Resolved to never belong to anyone but herself, Edna Pontellier controlled her own destiny.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Picture it. A balmy, breezy, almost tropical evening on Grand Isle. Louisiana Gulf. Cottages. 1890’s. Summertime. Can you feel the sea breeze blowing in? Smell the scent of the water? Can you hear the French Creole dialect running thick like Cajun gumbo through the words that get spoken? You’ll picture it a whole lot better if you slip on over to Endangered Species Theatre Project this April to experience their extraordinary production of Rebecca Chace’s The Awakening.
Growing up as an only child, I often imagined what it would be like to have siblings and to be able to grow older with them. After seeing Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike at Spotlighters Theatre I no longer need to imagine what that type of life might look like. Written by Christopher Durang and Directed by Erin Klarner, this play encapsulates the ups and downs of sibling dynamics and proves that even as adults’ siblings will always have a unique and indescribable bond.
“When your trust is all but shattered; when your faith is all but killed. You can give up bitter and battered or you can slowly start to build.”
I like to start most reviews, if I can help it, with a hook-line, usually some clever twist on one of the show’s iconic lyrics or themes, but this one is just a direct line-pull from “Beautiful City” because it’s what co-founders Albert J. Boeren and Lisa Boeren have created.
Are you ready to sit in a theatre and see a play of hopes and fears? Stillpointe Theatre invites you to do exactly that. Examine the unexamined; explore the darkened recesses of the mind of the master of the macabre. They present to you the regional premiere of Nevermore, a 90-minute musical which swirls and swivels through the madness that is the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore’s beloved poet. Directed by Ryan Haase,
Les Misérables is the second longest-running production in London and the sixth longest ever on Broadway. Indeed, the bar is high for the Tony-award-winning revival from acclaimed producer Cameron Mackintosh of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Tony Award-winning musical phenomenon. In 1986, The Kennedy Center hosted the pre-Broadway run of “Les Miz” and the audience at the Kennedy Center tonight seemed beyond enthusiastic to see its return. The energy level was on the level of seeing a favorite rock star in concert!
A song so beautiful it brings the world back into tune.
But’s a sad song.
It’s an old song.
And it is finally, finally here at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre!
The train on that long road to hell has arrived, bringing you the epic, Tony Award-winning musical Hadestown. With music, book, & lyrics by Anaïs Mitchell, this stylistically mesmerizing and wondrously refreshing take on an ancient Greek myth will dazzle and amaze,
The Alan Jay Lerner/Frederick Loewe classic My Fair Lady rolled their second leg of the post-Covid national tour into the National Theatre in DC. Originally conceived for Lincoln Center under the masterful eye of Bartlett Sher, the most accomplished director in the business for breathing new air and contemporary relevancy into beloved but dated musicals. Having had great success with such classics as The King & I, South Pacific, Fiddler on the Roof,
They come across my inbox like they always do; a cool drink of water— code for ‘new play’— just asking to be looked over. Not in distress or nothing, see? These ‘new works’ they hold their own. But I wouldn’t be a very good T.I. if I didn’t give it a once over, now would I. T.I.? What’s that? You don’t know? Theatrical Investigator. That’s me— Amanda Gunther, T.I. – and this new one— Craft Town?
Surreal. And yet utterly relatable. Immersive. And yet distantly isolated. Unfathomable. And yet completely imaginable. This paradox of experiences is what awaits the theatrical explorer that could— and should— be you, with Submersive Productions’ latest offering: Katalepsis. Welcome to a world set many generations in the future, where humanity has been wiped from the face of the earth by a virus, and only a precious few— four to be exact— remain, supported by mysterious benefactors,
It’s all true— it’s all true— hilarity will ensue! Down at The Dew Drop Inn— you’ll laugh too— it’s all true! Now granted, my lyrical composition isn’t nearly as hysterical as Jaki Demarest’s when it comes to scribbling together crackpot-laughable words for the 70’s heehaw hoe-down spin-about that happens pretty darn close to the end of Act I with some of the blokes box-stepping ‘round one another in sheer nonsense-grade bliss. Wait— sorry— TIMEWARP!! Back it up— all the waaaay back to the 1970s,
The sickness which no doctor can treat; the wound which can only be healed by the weapon which dealt the blow; Love. Movies, musicals, live-stage performances, television programs, radio dramas— you name it— have all attempted to conquer the subject, explore it or explain it, celebrate it, degrade it, deconstruct it— the path to love in our lives, particularly that interwove into our digestible media, is unending. But never has it felt so real, so relatable,
Hey guys! Sup?! I had the most awesome, freakiest experience last night. Actually, it was a good kind of freaky and I think you should get your freak on too! What am I talking about? Glad you asked! I think you all should come and, well, you know, like chill with the cast and crew of Freaky Friday presented by The Maryland Theatre Collective at The Chesapeake Arts Center in Brooklyn Park. I guarantee you will laugh,
I’m going to be honest. I’m not Adam Sandler’s biggest fan— or even really a fan, period— by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t like most of his movies, I think he thinks he’s funnier than he actually is, and on the whole, although we’re living in the golden “Oprah Era” of musicals (“…you get a musical, you get a musical, you get a musical, everybody gets a musical!”) and this particular one is not ‘new’ per se,
Crisis Mode: Living Pilipino in America at the Strand Theater
“If every Filipino lit a candle at the same time, we would light up the world”
The popular American narrative is one based around how this nation was built on people immigrating to these shores from a variety of other lands in search of work, opportunity, or security (whether by choice or by force). Additionally, the brutal historic reality is that this narrative has always been carefully focused on specific populations at specific points in time,
“You, you, you oughta know”
Typically with “jukebox musicals” we see the use of an album, or collection of songs associated with a band or musical artist, to tell their life story. However, in Jagged Little Pill’s case, Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album of the same name is used to tell not her story, nor even a story set in the same time frame as the album’s release, but rather a modern-day tale of themes that still ring true almost 30 years after the songs were written.
Sixty years ago Harper Lee penned what has become perhaps the quintessential American coming of age novel, the enduring and beloved staple of middle school American Literature curriculums To Kill a Mockingbird, which became in turn one of the most enduring and beloved movies of all time starring Gregory Peck, winner of the Academy Award for his endearing, human portrayal of antihero Atticus Finch trying to make a difference in the morality of the deep South.