By BOB HOOVER Head to the South Park Theatre and turn your watch back 60 years. It’s 1961, the Steelers practiced across the street at the South Park fairgrounds, boys rubbed Wildroot Cr…
By BOB HOOVER The Trial is a theatrical adaptation by Nick Gill of the Franz Kafka novel. Like Kafka’s protagonist, Joseph K., we know very little about the world of this curious pro…
This review has been updated with new production photographs. By BOB HOOVER Many plays have been written to showcase a particular actor. British playwright Christopher Hampton drew on an o…
By BOB HOOVER There’s no more “Irish” in PICT, the reborn theater company that survived the departures of founder Andrew Paul and his successor Allan Stanford. There’s plenty of e…
By BOB HOOVER It’s the third time around for Edward Albee‘s 63-year-old masterwork, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. Previously produced here in 19…
By BOB HOOVER Quantum Theatre is staging more than just a play, but a theatrical coup. Securing The Return of Benjamin Lay and its actor, Mark Povinelli, Quantum brings this play from it…
By BOB HOOVER The patriarchy has taken punches to the midsection in two recent productions on our regional stages. City Theatre last month presented Salina Fillinger‘s farce, POTUS Or Beh…
By Bob Hoover Don’t you love farce? Of course you do, and City Theatre is giving you one of the most raunchy, pratfall-filled comedies ever staged in Pittsburgh. With its awkward subti…
By BOB HOOVER Atmosphere and acting. Quantum Theatre’s wholehearted embrace of Eugene O’Neill’s last play blends the cricket-filled night of a wooded hill overlooking the Allegheny R…
By JESSICA NEU Liberty Magic continues its annual Spotlight on the Burgh series this week, featuring local Pittsburgh magicians to conclude Liberty’s magical season. For its second week…
By BOB HOOVER “They staged a play, and a party broke out,” said a patron at City Theatre on March 8 at the Pittsburgh premiere of Fat Ham, the boisterous, in-your-face version of Hamle…
Dominique Morisseau‘s prize-winning Skeleton Crew and Intimate Apparel, an early work by Lynn Nottage, opened this past week at barebones productions and the Pittsburgh Playhouse, resp…
By BOB HOOVER The murderers in Assassins seem pretty commonplace in these days of constant reports of violence as they point their guns at the audience. But these killers and would-be assa…
By BOB HOOVER In this unusual, smartly mounted musical production about the lives of Expressionist painter Marc Chagall and his writer wife, Bella, a knowledge of Yiddish would help a lot. L…
By BOB HOOVER How many versions of Hamlet have we seen? In my life, at least a dozen. (I was an English major). My previous was at the Globe Theatre in London, a fast-paced, almost breathl…
By BOB HOOVER Defeated, angry Black men are at the center of numerous August Wilson plays. Still, none is angrier and more dangerous than Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, no…
By BOB HOOVER Plaudits go to the South Park Theatre for taking on this difficult play about American history by playwright and screenwriter Melanie Marnich. Known for her work on the HBO s…
By Bob Hoover Somewhere in the Russian countryside, a family has gathered at its estate to figure out its future. Its most esteemed member, Serebryakov, has lost his professorship while his …
By BOB HOOVER City Theatre continues its run of topical dramas with a spirited, smart production of Karen Zacarias’s Native Gardens, a play that has the elements of a TV sitcom, but turns …
By Bob Hoover Lorraine Hansberry’s legendary play about segregation in Chicago reached Broadway in 1959. Sixty-three years later, a Bloomberg News report concludes: “About 400,000 Black …
By Bob Hoover After The Piano Lesson, the 1986 play that earned August Wilson his second Pulitzer Prize, he was ready to move on to the next chapter in his Pittsburgh cycle. The inspiration …
Reviewed by Bob Hoover Playwright David Mamet recently wrote that “theater on Broadway has largely been replaced by pageantry.” Audiences “come to Broadway exactly as they come to Disn…
Reviewed By Bob Hoover The spirit of that hopeful Hollywood cliché, “Let’s use the barn and put on a show!” runs through the energetic production of Company by the Riverfront Theater …
By Bob Hoover Let’s face it. Hardly anything new can be said about Hamilton. Now six years old, Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s masterpiece is the most honored and successful musical in American th…
By Bob Hoover The filmed version of this 2015 production, shown Oct. 3 at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, seems like an artifact from long ago when unmasked audiences sat within feet of the stage …