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 theatrical equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner. Making his way through each savory episode, Haig samples multiple comic possibilities, devouring each morsel served up by playwright Eric…

Hollywood is openly neurotic about its hatred of psychotherapy. Witness, most recently, Barbra Streisand’s ridiculous Dr. Susan Lowenstein in The Prince of Tides who aggressively mischaracterizes the entire profession with each flick of her nails. In the theater, however, obnoxious psychotherapists tend to appear when a playwright is trying to…

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 loves of their lives, aged without grace, and in some cases suffered devastating reversals of fortune. In the course of the play, some suffer even more…

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 George Jean Nathan, the esteemed American theater critic. Or “straw-hat trail,” the term used by others to denote the sartorial choices of the supposed…

The most startling scene in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde — making its Florida premiere at the Caldwell Theatre Company in Boca Raton — is the one that opens the second act. It’s set on the stage of a 20th-century talk show, where a fatuous TV host…

In his five-decade career, Cole Porter wrote songs for Fanny Brice, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and Bert Lahr, to name just a few. One measure of his virtuosity as a composer, however, is that no one singer really owns a Porter tune. Not even Frank Sinatra,…

Milton Berle isn’t actually backstage at The Last Supper, but his voice is, if only on Memorex. The Borscht Belt comedian has loaned his name and endorsement to Artie Butler’s hapless and ambitious new musical about a hapless but ambitious guy trying to sell a musical comedy to a Broadway…

Since there aren’t many coming-out stories about lesbians in Hoboken, New Jersey, it’s easy to imagine that the folks at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville sat up and took notice when Wendy Hammond sent in the script for Julie Johnson. What made them choose it for…

There’s only one genuinely dramatic moment in Cloud Tectonics, but, boy, is it a doozy. A man leaves a room and enters it moments later. His clothes are different. He’s carrying letters written while he was away. To him, two years have unfolded in the interim. To the characters on…

Imagine country-western heartthrob Clint Black inhabiting the body of Wagner’s romantic hero Siegfried and you’ll get the spirit of Das Barbecu, the Hee-Haw-inspired adaptation of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Yes, that Ring cycle. It’s the same nineteenth-century opera series — Das Rheingold, Die Walkurie, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung — that retells the…

By June 28, the end of its third season, City Theatre’s Summer Shorts festival will have put on 48 new plays on its main stage, about three times the number of productions of your average professional company. In fact, as you read this, fifteen premieres of blackout sketches, comic monologues,…

There’s nothing like a loud bang at the end of Act One to make you impatient for the end of the intermission so that you can scurry back to your seat and find out what happens next. Especially if that bang shreds every notion you had about the play up…

Of all the theatrical hams that have wandered across the stage of American pop culture — from the late-career John Barrymore to, say, Joan Rivers and Jim Belushi — none have endeared themselves as much as the tiny shank bone that wanders home atop the legs of Scout Finch near…

Roughly the size of a doublewide trailer, the performance space at Hollywood Boulevard Theatre is so small you can stare into the eyes of the actors, size up their varicose veins, and follow the trajectories of their spit with dumbfounding intimacy. As it happens, intimacy — or the spitting image…

Of the potentially kooky types of people that could be dumped into a play — lawyers, clairvoyants, fast-food servers, and dying parents — the most unwieldy are the clairvoyants. Even if an audience buys the notion of second sight, the playwright is still stuck with a peculiar problem: how to…

If you sat through three hours of the Tony Award-taking, Pulitzer Prize-winning, mega-publicity-hyped musical that promised to change the face of Broadway forever, only to wonder, “Is that all there is?” — read on. If you heard about the ballyhoo last week at Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Theater (the touring…

Antisemitropolis is the city Hitler never built. Blame that on playwright Dan Kagan, who imagines it as the name the Nazis gave their section of heaven — “a place with only people like them,” explains Jerry, a character in Kagan’s spirited black comedy Antisemitropolis, now getting its world premiere at…

Icebergs figure prominently in Titanic, Christopher Durang’s absurdly wild 1974 deconstruction of family life, but then so do hedgehogs, marmalade, and tortured slices of Wonder Bread. There’s no Leonardo DiCaprio, but there is a Captain. He’s the one sporting the black dildo on the white tennis headband — a getup…

Crack open a playwright whose career has just gotten under way, and you’ll more than likely find a dreamer wrestling with the ghost of Anton Chekhov. American theater festivals are littered with reinventions of The Three Sisters, the Chekhov classic in which characters saddled with longing speak of the day…

Moments after the legendary showboat Cotton Blossom pulls up to its Natchez, Mississippi, berth, skipper-cum-thespian Cap’n Andy declares, “You’ve never seen a show like this before.” But chances are you’ve seen many shows like this before. Indeed, you may have even performed in a show like this. Show Boat –…

When Seinfeld fans joke ad nauseum that the popular TV show is “about nothing,” they mean that the sitcom doesn’t have a traditional story hook. There’s no overarching premise along the lines of, say, “Widowed dad raises three kids with help from a Japanese housekeeper.” But even when a script…