In Nicky Silver’s The Lyons, comedy and tragedy are as inextricably linked as the two heads of conjoined twins; where one turns, the other follows. There is no joke that isn’t soaked in hurtful battery acid, and rare is the moment of unabashed sorrow that isn’t tempered with an acrid…

Certain names are enshrined in musical theater history. Eliza Doolittle. Harold Hill. Sally Bowles. General Butt-Fucking-Naked. The latter character — or any character, for that matter — from Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez’s The Book of Mormon likely won’t turn up on the program of a benign, geriatric…

Is hell really “other people,” as Jean Paul Sartre so succinctly put it in No Exit? Or is it the absence of people — the deadening loneliness of isolation, with nothing but time’s inevitable march to keep you company? That’s one of the questions inherently posed in The Time­keepers, Dan…

There is much suburban normalcy in the opening scene of Next to Normal — a hectic morning of rapid Cheerios consumption, backpacks slung over shoulders, briefcases, and tie-straightening. It isn’t until after Mom, with factory efficiency, hands off bagged lunches to the house’s scurrying denizens that things start to get…

Interactive dinner theater, as we know it, is something of a Catskillian tradition — tacky, disposable, with a low standard of quality and a lower audience denominator. The takeaway from the Coral Springs Center for the Arts’ Polter-Heist production — the first in its 2013-14 Sherlock’s Dinner Theatre season —…

Since it established permanent residency in our collective cultural brain-vault, The Silence of the Lambs — the famous thriller about cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter — has seen its share of parodies, from musical theater (Silence! The Musical) to porn to a Funny or Die! spoof. But there’s always room…

Laura shook all over. She couldn’t talk except to repeat the other girl’s name over and over, as if she were in a trance. Neither of them heard the phone ring, felt the chill of the rainy night, knew of anything except each other.” Author Ann Bannon published these words…

One of Gilbert Gottfried’s signatures, in addition to a voice that makes nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart, is his propensity to say the wrong things at the wrong time. If there’s ever an opportunity to jeopardize his career and good standing, he’ll take full advantage of it. On…

Stage hypnotist Rich Guzzi has learned to expect the unexpected. In one memorable performance, he instructed 15 hypnotized audience volunteers to compose and perform a rap song onstage — in Chinese. One by one, they shed their inhibitions and freestyled vaguely Oriental gibberish, at the cultural expense of any unfortunate…

This past June, City Theatre’s annual Miami production of “Summer Shorts” — a festival of short-form plays — was certifiably nuts. The shows were weirder than David Lynch’s Twitter feed. There were works about former B-movie baddie Mothra, bickering dolphins on a subway train, a nail-filing vampire, a wing-growing adolescent,…

In his career with World Wrestling Entertainment, Mick Foley has been thrown from the roof of a 16-foot-high cage, where he crashed through a broadcasting booth; hit by a steel chair, which dislocated his jaw and dislodged a tooth; nailed with a removable stairwell wielded as a weapon by his…

When he wanted to be, William Shakespeare was the Martin Scorsese of his time. If you look at the climax of Hamlet and The Departed, the two aren’t far off — pretty much everybody dies in a bloody blitzkrieg of deceit and revenge. The Bard was invariably a tragedian, humorist,…

There is a place in the Western theater canon for Pinter, O’Neill, and Shakespeare, and there is also a place for shows with lines like “When I was your age, I was as moist as a Sara Lee pound cake.” Jamie Morris’ The Facts of Life: The Lost Episode is…

A 9-year-old girl with leukemia and a war correspondent kidnapped and bound in a Middle Eastern cell do not sound like typical subjects for American musicals, a form often associated with jubilance and escapism. They sound like more CNN headlines or Oscar-bait movies. But two musicals about just these subjects,…

Waafrika is the kind of work that could get a playwright killed in a less enlightened country. It doesn’t just upset an apple cart of tradition practiced in 28 nations — it uproots the cart and smashes the apples, revealing the rotten cores and razor blades tucked inside. Written by…

The set design for Outre Theatre Company’s forthcoming production of tick tick… Boom! begins at the foot of the stage with a white picket fence enclosing the action. But it’s not just any fence. It’s also designed to resemble a piano, complete with painted-on black keys and decorated with faint…

Anyone can use Polaris, the north star, to orient himself in the world, says Brian Welch, the stargazing young presenter of a show at Buehler Planetarium on a recent Friday night. But in our perpetually wired age of GPS ubiquity, we don’t really need it anymore. Until the zombies come…

If War Horse does its job, you’ll leave the theater crying — not over the relationship between two humans or even between a human and a live horse but between a boy and a mechanical horse puppet made of cane-wrapped aluminum and mesh fabric. To say the national tour of…

Rehearsals are usually about mastering movements — be they physical, emotional, musical, or linguistic — so that when the time comes to perform in front of an audience, everyone knows exactly how to fall in line with the script or sheet music. So it’s strange to see a troupe of…

How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is… a fish. This is an old joke, but I had never heard it until Colin McPhillamy, the lead actor in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ Exit the King, told it to the audience as he wandered around the…

You’ve heard of theater in the round? Lungs is theater in the raw. Popular among adventurous, budget-conscious regional theaters, Duncan Macmillan’s renegade dramedy features just two people on a bare stage, acting for 90 minutes. No set, no props, no pantomiming, no costume changes, no sound cues, no breaks… no…