128 stories by "Christopher Rawson"
They say Christmas comes but once a year, but it sure seems like more as the year turns quicker and quicker. This tends to fray some familiar Christmas traditions. It's one of those good new…
Never match wits with a master. That is to say, when reviewing a genius wit like Oscar Wilde (and who is there like him?), don't try to be witty yourself. You can't measure up.
You may get that the title, "Love, Love, Love," is borrowed from the Beatles' song where it is insistently celebrated as "all we need." But the sour intelligence in Mike Bartlett's sharp new…
Thanksgiving came early " and also Christmas and any other family-gathering holiday on your immediate horizon. But Stephen Karam's disarmingly titled "The Humans" at the Pittsburgh Public Th…
At the end, it isn't just the famous young lovers who die, but also those interesting supporting roles in which Shakespeare specialized, the frantic, babbling Mercutio, fiery Tybalt and, in …
There's safety in the familiar, right? It's 1955. Seven men gather to share stories and drink beer in Charlesetta's coloreds-only roadside bar, a rough-cut place out in the woods somewhere i…
Early on in Sean Christopher Lewis' "Red Hills," the western academic expects to talk about what's happened.
English playwright Caryl Churchill is a modern master, and her "Cloud 9" (1979) is a wonderful play; you could call it a modern classic. That makes the staging by the small, preprofessional …
NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario " Things always seem the same in this lovely little town with its big theater festival, but they're always different, too.
Can you really have too much of a good thing " even of a very, very good thing?
Mark Rylance is coming back to pursue a passion. The award-winning actor, director and activist will help celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Homestead here with a performance "…
Mark Rylance was born in England in 1960 and brought up in the U.S. (primarily Wisconsin), 1962-78. He returned to England to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
By any other name, the postindustrial wastes outside Elizabeth, N.J., might well be (insert familiar Western Pennsylvania steel town of your choice). So you settle in for a gritty drama of c…
From its start some 14 years ago, Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre (Mark Southers, founder and artistic director) has attracted most attention for its loving attention to August Wilson. But it…
Classics come in many dimensions and flavors, but they should always be engaging, no matter how familiar, and also reveal something new.
Happy 72nd birthday, August Wilson!
Whizz! Bang! It's off to the races with a comic chase scene, our hero pursued by an unmistakable Josef Stalin, one of the all-time monsters in the Hall of Despots, trying to brain him with h…
And now for the granddaddy of them all, Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex"! It's not literally the oldest play in the western canon, but it's the one most people know, the distant ancestor of works fr…
LONDON " The blockbuster here is "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," as big since it opened last July as "Hamilton" is on Broadway, with tickets sold out more than a year in advance and all…
In Jessica Dickey's witty and absorbing new play, "The Guard," we are referred constantly to an unseen painting: Rembrandt's famous "Aristotle With [or Contemplating] a Bust of Homer," where…
Pittsburgh is blessed in its two big college theater programs, Carnegie Mellon and Point Park, which each year send dozens of graduates into the national professional pool.
What else would there be but rain, this being the west coast of Ireland, the setting for "The Beauty Queen of Leenane"? It falls steadily throughout the first scene and again at the end, as …
