Editor
Julia Polinsky wrote, directed, produced, and starred in her first play when she was 7 years old. She’s been paying a lot of attention to theater ever since.
Photo Credit: Genevieve Rafter Keddy by Julia Polinsky For sixteen years, Scott Siegel has created, written, directed, and produced Broadway By The Year at The Town Hall. Decade by decade, year by year, songs from Broadway shows get special treatment by superb singers and the best “little big band” ever. The most recent,…
L-R: Matthew Russell (The Bard), Ryan McCurdy (Mercutio), Christine Verleny (Mistress Quickly), Mick Bleyer (Ben). Photo by Gerry Goodstein by Julia Polinsky Verona Walls, by the talented young playwright Laura Hirschberg, presents a back story for Romeo and Juliet. It focuses on Mercutio, whose tale of love and death plays out against a…
Len Cariou photos by Caro Rosegg By Julia Polinsky With Broadway and the Bard, Len Cariou, Mark Janas, and Barry Kleinbort, (who also directed) have conceived an evening of show tunes married to Shakespeare’s poetry. Janas, whose masterful accompaniments contribute hugely to Broadway and the Bard, plays a beautiful intro. Then, Cariou declaims…
EMMA MEAD by Julia Polinsky Once the Hollywood machine gets hold of something like the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson, or, in this case, the Oz books, it’s easy for us to forget how dark children’s stories are. How they come from spaces of loss and fear. Tales of orphaned or abandoned…
By Julia Polinsky Director Sean Daniels has paced I and You is if it were dishing out social-media instant information, and the two actors who play the high school students blitz through their dialogue at warp speed. That speed may be appropriate for teenagers, but it serves the story badly. All the clues are…
Photos by Carol Rosegg By Julia Polinsky Charming, elegant, confident, delightful, and engaging: pick an adjective that basically says, “How Cool Was THAT,” and it’ll apply to Maurice Hines in Tappin’ Thru Life. At 72, you’d think he could be content to sit back and enjoy the fruits of a long…
Photos by Carol Rosegg By Julia Polinsky Directors Milton Zoth and John Pierson, of the St. Louis Actors’ Studio, have done what they can to rise above two of the toughest challenges facing much regional theater: actors who do too much, and budget/space constraints that force them to do everything with nothing. As…
Steven Friedman Photos by Gerald Slota Phalaris’s Bull: Solving the Riddle of the Great Big World by Julia Polinsky Enchanting or annoying: which? You’ll have to make that decision for yourself. Steven Friedman’s Phalaris’s Bull claims to be “solving the riddle of the great big world.” In the process of trying to understand what…
Andrew Dunn, Ashley Adelman, Tim Riley, Alla Illvosa, Kaitlyn Huczko, Jordan Gwiazdowski by Julia Polinsky Who’s insignificant? Sean Michael Welch’s Insignificant, as mounted by Infinite Variety Productions says that women are, even when they do important work. The show feels like a class in Women’s History, complete with a catalogue of postmodern feminist…
Griffin Matthews and Michael Luwoye photo by Joan Marcus. By Julia Polinsky Lots of youthful earnestness, needing some work. But in Invisible Thread, with saturated colors, vibrant movement, and heart-tugging sentiment, as the first-act anthem says, they put it all on the line. Griffin Matthews opens Invisible Thread by telling us, up…