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By Dennis Brown
Paul Rudnick — playwright, screenwriter, essayist — is a man with a mission. He advocates for a tolerant world where acceptance... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
Is there anything more enjoyable than watching good actors work? And when those actors are portraying actors, there's an added wrinkle of fun.... More >>
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By Paul Friswold
The entirety of Tony Kushner's Angels in America takes seven hours to play out, here stretched over two nights by director Gary F. Bell. Stray... More >>
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By Chrissy Wilmes
As Memphis: The Musical begins and we see a Beale Street nightclub erupt into song and dance, it's impossible to tell who the star will be... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
We are in a shabby Chicago recording studio (evocatively designed by Tim Case) on a wintry March afternoon in 1927. A white record producer (Tom... More >>
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By Chrissy Wilmes
Tom Jones' and Harvey Schmidt's musical tribute to marriage is a bit outdated (from the virginal bride to the raising of two children on a... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
No theater company in town delights more in transporting its audiences to remote places than does Upstream Theater. For its current offering,... More >>
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By Paul Friswold
In the wrong hands, The Winter's Tale is a whiplash inducer. Roughly the first half of the play charts an irreversible descent into rage and... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
By evening's end, the mayhem in Tracy Letts' grim 1993 comedy Killer Joe is downright cacophonous. Yet the current St. Louis Actors' Studio... More >>
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By Chrissy Wilmes
Exit the King The third installment of absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco's four-part "Berenger Cycle," Le Roi se meurt (Exit the King)... More >>
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By Paul Friswold
The first (and perhaps the only) thing you need to know about Bring It On: The Musical is that cheerleaders are amazing people capable of... More >>
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By Paul Friswold
Paul Mason Barnes' Mardi Gras-tinged version of The Comedy of Errors opens with a big, brassy musical introduction to all the characters that's... More >>
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Dennis Brown
Take this as a personal confession. I've been tiring of one-person plays of late, especially one-person plays where a single actor performs... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
There are many maxims about theater, but none is truer than this: Casting is everything. Even a major play can seem small if the actors are... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
On this, its first visit to St. Louis, the Canadian-based entertainment Cavalia has made camp just north of Busch Stadium. Inside its turreted,... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
On this, its first visit to St. Louis, the Canadian-based entertainment Cavalia has made camp downtown. Inside its turreted, Camelot-like main... More >>
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By Paul Friswold
A little way into The Invisible Hand, staged this month as part of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis' Studio Series, Ayad Akhtar's play seems... More >>
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By Chrissy Wilmes
A cursory spin through Bugs playbill primes the viewer for a sci-fi-psychotic hallucination that will render every character in the small cast... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
Like an over-ardent gentleman caller, The Glass Menagerie is wooing St. Louis theatergoers from two directions. Tennessee Williams' elegiac... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
Like the mighty Mississippi River that Mark Twain helped to immortalize, Hal Holbrook just keeps rolling along. Mark Twain Tonight! Holbrook's... More >>
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By Paul Friswold
Cameron Dobbs is having one of the worst 30th birthdays of all time. What he expected to be a quiet dinner with his older brother and... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
When the cat's away, the mice will play. You won't hear that idiom in Jean Genet's 1947 absurdist play The Maids, which is currently being staged... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
Let me tell you what's terrific about the current staging of West Side Story at the Fox Theatre: the sound. I've never heard songs so... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
"Race is the most incendiary topic in our history," a white attorney tells his black paralegal in David Mamet's prickly new whodunit. "And the... More >>
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By Paul Friswold
Urinetown, the Musical is an odd bird. The plot is ridiculous, the characters are cardboard cutouts of stereotypes, the book relies on puns and... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
It's New Year's Eve 1989. A traveling carnival has set up shop outside a small town in the South African desert. Judging from the deserted... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
A piercing whistle blows, so shrill that it assaults the very air. When that air is still again, a little girl with a yellow star stitched to the... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
Two huge flags — one from the North, one from the South — drape the stage like a tattered curtain that never rises and never falls.... More >>
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By Paul Friswold
There's a languid, busy-doin'-nothin' quality to On Golden Pond that suits its subject matter: the presumptive final summer spent at the Maine... More >>
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By Dennis Brown
As he stands alone in a room crowded with potential investors, a conceptual artist named George bemoans the hoops through which he must jump in... More >>
