Keith Waits - Page 5

Something Rotten! roared into town this week. And judging from the high-energy opening night, audiences won't be lifting their noses at this hybrid Shakespeare/Musical production. The title itself is a quotation from one of Shakespeare's best-known plays and includes the ubiquitous use of exclamation points in titles of musicals. Additionally, this particular quote points to some of the plot points in the storyline.

Marriages fail for many reasons, or perhaps, more often than not, it boils down to the fear that you have sacrificed something for that commitment, and you want another chance to get it back. And if you have children, the weight is much greater.

If Actors Theatre were to make an annual tradition of producing the latest Dominique Morisseau play every January, it would be a reason to rejoice. One year after the indelible Skeleton Crew, director Steve H. Broadnax III, and actor Patrese D. McClain have returned with Pipeline, an even stronger play that implodes the narrative cliches that have weighed down African American stories for generations.

This week's Broadway Series production ushers in the holiday season with the stage adaptation of the 1983 movie, A Christmas Story. It took almost three decades for the musical to come into being, hitting Broadway November 2012. The perennial television favorite is a nostalgic stroll through small-town northern Indiana circa 1940. And a new tradition is developing with recent years' seasonal tours of A Christmas Story The Musical.

If you have been even remotely close to a mall and/or department store during the Holiday season, you know well the Scene. Often found within the center of the shopping hub-bub and cleverly placed near the toys, an onslaught of seasonal scenery is in sight: adorable gingerbread houses, cotton-candy like 'snow' drifts that are replete with gumdrops and woodland creatures and candy canes that are 4-8 feet tall that line a snow-covered road where you are assisted by happy helpers that support and guide your way. And we all know to whom that road leads...Santa Claus!!! Oh, the excitement builds just thinking about visiting with Ol' St. Nick, or is that anxiety and nausea?

As a kid, I remember watching White Christmas (1954) every year with my family. When I got a little older I came across Holiday Inn, the 1941 precursor that also starred Bing Crosby, but paired with Fred Astaire, and introducing the song 'White Christmas'. There was a widely held opinion among some of my friends that it was the superior movie, an attitude that remained as long as we were only watching the edited version on commercial television. Because you see, they always cut the Blackface number. Once you see it, all innocence about this movie is lost. It forever tarnishes a film that contains two of Fred Astaire's most innovative numbers: the firecracker dance, and the drunken New Year's Eve tango that is a masterpiece of comic movement. Even for the time this number, egregiously inserted for the Lincoln's Birthday sequence (yes, it was once a holiday), seems shocking and offensive.

This review includes a longer than usual list of credits in the header, and that may point to a deficiency in the posting of other reviews, but the exception made here is to indicate the particularly balanced collaboration among the team members.

Poets have been seeking the truth about love for centuries. As elusive as the breeze and as prolific as the butterfly.

I'm not sure how many have read Mary Shelley's classic novel, so familiar is the creature from countless generations of the story that have moved further and further from the source. It seems likely that there might be a good number of people who have never read or seen any of these, and only know the Frankenstein 'monster' as a cartoonish icon. But it is in the theatre that we tend to find iterations that hew closer to the original tale.

Walking to my car after seeing Bunbury Theatre's current show at The Henry Clay, I had to return a phone call to my sister.

I think I speak for the majority of liberal America when I say that the times we live in are exhausting. More than that, they are disheartening in a way that embitters us to the victories and further dampens the tragedies of our nation's storied past. It is difficult to believe that there will ever be a time when compassion, honesty, and simple kindness will become ubiquitous virtues again. One blip in this bleak outlook, however, is the promise of youth, the eternal hope that the next generation will finally get it right. Emma Gonzalez and the other survivors of the Parkdale shooting are testaments to that fact, and this cast of high school students' presenting The Laramie Project ties into that same spirit.

After the disappointment of canceling Waitress following the June 13 fire at the Kentucky Center, Broadway in Louisville kicks off the current season in spectacular style. The 2014 Broadway production of Disney's Aladdin flew into Louisville this week for an extended run.

On October 30, 1938, just before 8:00 pm, Americans gathered around the radio to listen to Mercury Theatre On The Air, an anthology series produced and hosted by Orson Welles. That evening's program, scripted by Howard Koch, was a modern-day adaptation of H.G. Well's The War of the Worlds, one of the first tales of alien invasion, in which Martians emerged from meteors to lay waste to all of the Earth's civilizations. Except that Koch, with help from producers John Houseman, Paul Stewart and Welles himself, structured the program to play, at least in the first moments, as special news bulletins interrupting a normal performance by a dance orchestra. The ruse seems thin even for the time, but Hitler had 'annexed' Austria a few months earlier, and was threatening to do more, so the program struck a chord and the resulting panic in the area in close proximity - Welles' Martians landed in a New Jersey pasture, sent East Coast residents scurrying across bridges and clogging highways.

Lucas Hnath's A Doll's House Part 2 opens with a knock on a door. Reid Thompson's haunting set design stretches across the Victor Jory Theatre with purpose, making the smallest ATL performance space feel somehow like the largest, and in in the center stands a door, tall, purple, and foreboding. The knock also begins small but grows louder and more insistent as no one comes to answer it.

If you were fortunate to be in the opening night audience of Commonwealth Theater Company's (CTC) production of Blue Stockings, you had the privilege to witness not only a brilliant performance but also a pre-show panel discussion entitled 'Leadership, Representation, and the Impact of Women in Higher Education: Past, Present & Future' with Sadiqa Reynolds, President & CEO, Louisville Urban League, Inc., Tori Murden McClure, President of Spalding University, Kimberly Kempf-Leonard, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Louisville, and CTC Outreach Director and production director Heather Burns. This discussion addressed the struggles of gender inequality and opportunity in the collegiate field. Diving into hard-hitting questions such as: is there room for all of us (all genders), and are women feeling more valued? while shedding light on the power of competence versus dominance, the panel provided a thought-provoking meditation for themes of suffrage and rights in Blue Stockings.

Not so many years ago, a person diagnosed with a behavioral and/or learning disability would have been sent to a 'special' school or home where, most of the time, just their basic needs were met, with little human interaction or development.

'In here, life is beautiful...' a phrase repeated by the Emcee of the Kit-Kat Club in Berlin. This emcee invites his audience to forget and ignore their troubles and hardship and indulge in a world full of dancing girls, flirtations, and decadence. Gritty, powerful and raw, Pandora Productions current production of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret is blistering and beautiful.

Nineteenth-century mansions always put me in a good mood on a cool September night. If there is a good story to go along with said mansion, all the better. Actors Theatre of Louisville kicks off the fall and its New Play Project with A. Rey Pamatmat's The Electric Harvest, a site-specific one-act set in the Conrad Caldwell House in Saint James Court (the bartender gave us the low down on its haunted history), but this isn't a traditional haunting story or really anything you would expect from the setting. The actors inhabiting the mansion, we discover, are caught in a continuous death loop, killed and brought back to life by a flock creepy bird-like demons.

Vidalia Unwin has been a playwright and an actor for several years in Louisville and the surrounding area. The Alley Theater, The Bard's Town, and Finnigan Productions have produced her plays. Most recently, Broken Iris made its debut as part of the inaugural Louisville Fringe Festival. It happens also to be the first play produced since the playwright, a transgender individual, has been in transition.

Let's return to the farmlands of Minnesota and visit some of the funniest Lutheran ladies that have ever graced a stage: the Church Basement Ladies. 'Rise Up, O Men' is the fifth musical addition to the continuing stories inspired from a book by Janet Letnes Martin and Suzann Nelson, entitled Growing Up Lutheran. Written by Greta Grosch, who was the original Mavis when CBL first appeared in 2005, this iteration allows a few of the men in the lives of the church to have a bit of the spotlight.