Peter Michael Goetz dominates The Sunshine Boys (at the Guthrie, through September 2), Neil Simon‘s paean to the lost glories of Vaudeville. Goetz plays Willie Clark, one half of the famous comedy team Lewis and Clark. It’s the early 70s and Vaudeville is long gone. Clark dodders, wanders his sprawling apartment is a fog...
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To his credit, in End Of The Rainbow (at the Guthrie, through March 11) playwright Peter Quilter refuses to give us the “pretty” Judy Garland, the achingly luminous singer who wowed us in The Wizard Of Oz (age 17), A Star Is Born (32), at the famous Carnegie Hall concert (age 41 – “The...
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Julius Caesar, asserts the officious and buttoned down Brutus in his oration at Caesar’s funeral, “was ambitious, I slew him.” But isn’t ambition the assassins’ over-riding motivation? They pay poor lip service to serving “great Rome,” but “lean and hungry” Cassius and his furtive cohorts react mostly to the man’s raw power. ...
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In the 1990s during the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina, over 100,000 people were killed and more than 2 million people displaced in one of the most horrific set of human-inflicted tragedies since WWII. Heaven, a new work by Flying Foot Forum, directed by Joe Chvala with music by Chan Poling (The Suburbs, The...
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Normally Latté Da specializes in intelligent but feel-good music theater: All Is Calm, La Bohème, The Full Monty, etc. But here they are, tackling E.M. Lewis‘s challenging straight play (such an odd term) Song Of Extinction (Theater Latté Da performing on the Guthrie’s Dowling Stage, through March 20). Song Of Extinction is a fierce...
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At the very end of William Shakespeare‘s The Winter’s Tale (on the Guthrie‘s Wurtele Stage, through March 27) the statue comes alive. Hermione lives! She embraces, and forgives, Leontes. Wow. It’s one of the most thrilling moments in the canon, but it immediately creates an issue: did the intensity of Leontes’s grief and longing...
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