Email Author Robin Dougherty

1998 Stories by Robin Dougherty

• Between Opera and a Rocky Place

  published December 31, 1998

  When damsels with golden ring curls find themselves tied to railroad trestles by mustachioed villains -- or, in the case of Little Mary Sunshine,... More >>

• Star-Crossed Druthers

  published December 24, 1998

  In the second half of Steve Dietz's new play, Rocket Man, time moves backward in an enchanting fashion. The elderly are the newest people on... More >>

• Shufflin' Off to Hollywood

  published December 17, 1998

  Gavin MacLeod, erstwhile captain of the Love Boat, sails blithely through Moon Over Buffalo with an erect rubber nose. He's playing Cyrano de... More >>

• A Dickens of a Duo

  published December 10, 1998

  Of all the repertory programs ever devised, the double bill playing this month at the New Theatre has got to be one of the most delightfully odd.... More >>

• Do Not Go Gentile Into that Good Night

  published December 3, 1998

  A tinsel-decked Christmas tree overwhelms the living room of Atlanta's upstanding Freitag family. The ceiling-scraping spruce is about to be... More >>

• Life Is a Broadway Play, Old Chum

  published November 26, 1998

  Given the vroom-vroom of their current go-round on stage, it's possible that, even with the theatrical equivalent of a road map, you might not be... More >>

• Bent Outof Shape

  published November 19, 1998

  When a play's title is The Adjustment, chances are the playwright will be suggesting a monumental shift in attitude or perspective on the part of... More >>

• Shtick Shift

  published November 12, 1998

  If you had a conventional grammar school education and watch a little Nick at Nite, chances are you don't think of Sebastian Cabot as the... More >>

• The Ghostwritten Henry James

  published November 5, 1998

  From the works of Edgar Allan Poe to Hollywood's The Fly, classic American ghost stories indulge our fascination with the decay of the body.... More >>

• Not So Dynamic Duo

  published October 29, 1998

  Nobody knows if Scott Joplin ever knew Irving Berlin. In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, Mark Saltzman's well-meaning musical, however, the two composers... More >>

• Love Is a Bumper Car

  published October 22, 1998

  Love may indeed be a fragile thing, but its clumsy male and female protagonists can't help "endlessly crashing into each other like two bumper... More >>

• Romeo and Juliet in Technicolor

  published October 15, 1998

  Nobody who's seen the off-Broadway version of The Fantasticks at New York City's Sullivan Street Playhouse will recognize the set of the appealing... More >>

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Theater

  published October 8, 1998

  In 1964, when I was five years old, my father told me that Patty Duke didn't have a twin. Naturally I recognized this information for what it was... More >>

• A Woman of the People

  published October 1, 1998

  Twelve years ago Lily Tomlin opened her mouth and launched a thousand monologues. The 1986 Broadway success of The Search For Signs of Intelligent... More >>

• The Two Tenors

  published September 24, 1998

  Music, as a theater insider once put it, is the food of love. Opera, on the other hand, is a series of naughty sexual escapades, repeatedly... More >>

• All Dressed Up and Going Nowhere

  published September 17, 1998

  Of all the things your mother specifically told you not to do -- talk with your mouth full, go out with married men -- chances are she didn't... More >>

• There's Something About Jodie

  published September 10, 1998

  Of all the people you might encounter in a solo drama, John Hinckley is not likely to be anyone's first choice. Chances are the would-be Reagan... More >>

• Tempests in a Teapot

  published September 3, 1998

  Creating theater frequently involves assembling miracles in small spaces -- extremely small spaces, if you happen to be the Florida Playwrights'... More >>

• That Screwball Family of Yours

  published August 27, 1998

  There's a moose in the guest bedroom in Michael McKeever's new comedy, 37 Postcards. The animal never makes an appearance on stage (a taxidermist... More >>

• You'll Die Laughing

  published August 20, 1998

  Actor Peter Haig embraces his role as Vincent Vincent, the pivotal character in the British farce Natural Causes, as though he were gorging on the... More >>

• Psycho Analysis

  published August 13, 1998

  Hollywood is openly neurotic about its hatred of psychotherapy. Witness, most recently, Barbra Streisand's ridiculous Dr. Susan Lowenstein in The... More >>

• Losers and Laughs

  published August 6, 1998

  Simpatico may be the funniest play about losers in Sam Shepard's entire prolific output. Long before we meet them, these characters have lost the... More >>

• Between Interest and Boredom

  published July 30, 1998

  Summer theater is the sort of oxymoron that conjures up farcical epithets such as "dramatic hot dog stand," to use the term coined by the late... More >>

• Out of the Closet, Into the Fire

  published July 23, 1998

  The most startling scene in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde -- making its Florida premiere at the Caldwell Theatre Company in... More >>

• Getting a Kick Out of Cole

  published July 16, 1998

  In his five-decade career, Cole Porter wrote songs for Fanny Brice, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and Bert Lahr, to... More >>