Entries from September 2008 ↓

?Shrek the Musical? has recast one major role and is reconceiving a second, the show?s producers announced.

The Walt Disney Company said that a permanent production of ?The Lion King? would open in May at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

Counting Squares Theatre comes into its own as a compelling new voice in New York’s indie theater community with a very impressive production of Woyzeck at Under St. Marks. Joshua Chase Gold, who has adapted and directed Georg Buchner’s famous play from 1837, masterfully mashes up three wartime epochs here: Buchner’s own, ours (the war in Iraq), and a mythic one from in between (World War II).

The Painter, a new one-act drama by Reginald Oldham, is an involving, entertaining, twisty mystery where nothing and nobody can be trusted to be what it/he/she seems. Oldham himself stars as Michael Train, a painter whose wife has just been brutally murdered (knife in the heart; lots of blood). Michael says he found his wife this way; that he was in his studio, painting, and didn’t hear her screams (though a neighbor did hear them, and called the police); that he loved his wife and he can’t believe she’s gone.

A new piece by the British company DV8 Physical Theater looks at religion and sexuality through the words of more than 85 people.

Christine Ebersole will return to Broadway in a revival of Noël Coward?s ?Blithe Spirit.?

The Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, which runs through Sunday at the Bell House and at Union Hall in Park Slope, ?is sort of half ironic and half sincere.?

Imagine A. R. Gurney thoroughly rewriting ?August: Osage County? and you have some sense of what Elizabeth Diggs is aiming for in ?Close Ties.?

One of the sentences from last week’s Presidential Debate that hasn’t gotten much attention is this one, uttered by Barack Obama: "No U.S. soldier ever dies in vain because they’re carrying out the missions of their commander in chief." The tens of thousands of troops who are or have been on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan in our two current wars don’t ever seem to make it onto the news unless they die. Yvonne Latty’s book In Conflict, which has been dramatized by adapter/director Douglas C. Wager, makes some of these young men and women real to us, and reminds us how truly ignored/forgotten our veterans really are once they come home.

The coming revival of ?West Side Story? will open at the Palace Theater on March 19.