162 stories by "John Olson"
With "Hero," in its first full production at the Marriott Theatre, writers Aaron Theilen and Michael Mahler apply the genre to the sort of story and characters that might be played in the mo…
Just three years and three months after Titanic sunk, the SS Eastland, a Lake Michigan cruise ship carrying over 2500 passengers, tipped over on its side even before leaving its dock on the …
With a trio of active Broadway producers and direction by Broadway and TV star Phylicia Rashad, this new play by Paul Oakley Stovall has the firepower to support its announced hopes for a Br…
The life of Marvin Gaye, the R&B singer with a three-octave range who became one of Motown's greatest stars, is indeed quite a story.
Long before Eric Simonson began his campaign to bring sports fans into the theater with "Lombardi" and "Magic/Bird," he adapted the 1956 Mark Harris novel "Bang the Drum Slowly" for the stag…
At the end of the day, LaBute seems to be saying we're all-progressive or conservative-trying to make sense of life and get by.
In this presidential election year, we hear a lot about politicians "playing to the base." [title of show] isn't particularly political, but it sure plays to the base audience for musicals.
It's an admirable approach in its insistence on taking the characters seriously and playing it first as drama, with the music entirely in service of story. The results, though, are a very mi…
Debra Ehrhardt's one-woman show, which was an award winner in New York's 2007 Fringe Festival and has been touring the country since, takes a little while to get going but ends up being a fu…
Shakespeare's uncompromising view of the evils of wealth is given an equally explicit statement of its resonance today in Barbara Gaines' production of this seldom-performed play, starring I…
The action occurs over some 48 hours in their lives and sharing nearly one-tenth of that in real time with them, it gives a sense of living through those two days. Over that time, we see the…
It's way too early for a Broadway revival of Hairspray, but if it weren't, its producers would be lucky to come up with a production as good as the one that just opened at Chicago's Drury La…
... imagine, if you will, that the professor of your Shakespeare course is one of the world's most esteemed interpreters of the Bard's work and you'll have a good picture of Simon Callow's p…
Candido Tirado's new play opens on five of the regulars in this corner of the park: three hustlers, one casual player, and one who never plays but watches and hangs on anyway.
Writer-director Frank Galati has once again brought an E. L. Doctorow novel to the stage, and like Galati's earlier Doctorow project, 1997's Ragtime, his adaptation of The March, now in its …
Though Nash's play is romantic and fanciful in the way the con man saves the spinster from loneliness, his characters are grounded in reality.
Indeed, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne are becoming legends in the strictest definition of the word-increasingly fewer people are living who could have seen them perform live and, as they cho…
As a seldom-performed work of Tennessee Williams, envisioned by a major European director who has rarely worked in the U.S. and performed by a stellar cast, the Goodman's production of Camin…
Arthur Miller's 1968 play The Price takes place in the attic of a Manhattan brownstone that had been the family home of the play's two middle-aged brothers, and the lifetime of family mement…
In bookwriter Jeff Whitty's reworking of Bring It On-with a different plot and characters than the 1990 film of this title, but based on a similar premise-a white, blonde cheerleader from a …
It's rare for a musical to communicate this much depth of character, and deliver so solidly on the "theatre" part of "musical theatre."
The production is somewhat downsized from the Broadway version, but smartly so.
The lines land as well here as in any Neil Simon comedy. I had to check to see if Hermia's insult of the tall and slender Helena as a "painted maypole" was in the original, and indeed it is.
It seems everything that could have been done to make this as perfect a re-creation of the piece as originally conceived has been done.
There is probably a good and entertaining play to be written around the premise of a woman dating an alleged wife killer, but this world premiere production at the Raven Theatre, sadly, isn'…
