A DOO-WOP DREAM He's going strong for a guy who died 400 years ago today. This, of course, is easily William Shakespeare's most popular comedy, if only because it delivers some magical goods…
PRODUCESÂ MORE LAUGHS PER MINUTE THAN ANY OTHER MUSICAL It's always springtime for Mel Brooks, who really does write musicals the way they used to. Even before Young Frankenstein, his 2001…
AND EVITA KEEPS ROLLING IN That great balcony scene is back. No, not R&J. It's the one with Eva Duarte Perón's valedictory aria "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina.” As this princes…
AS FUNNY AS A PUNCH ON THE JAW Call it a comic "war of the worlds." It's the tabloid-trashy tale of a Broadway show that is literally "under the gun." As the title suggests, Woody Allen and …
DON’T WALK ON BY THIS SHOW "You won't get a career from singing: Singing will give you a career." That was all the encouragement that Dionne Warwick needed to make it big over 54 years…
AND I AM TELLING YOU — YOU ARE GOING I never saw the two touring revivals of the Tony-honored Dreamgirls that played Chicago's old Shubert Theatre. But, like Marriott Theatre's rivetin…
A GREEN-EYED RAP ROMPÂ ADDSÂ MOOR TO THE MIX Before Othello: The Remix it was only Shakespeare's comedies that received the Q brothers' trademark, rap-happy revision"Funk It Up About Not…
A STUDY IN SPITE BECOMES A PUERILE HISSY FIT The joke's on us in Thomas Bradshaw's 75-minute Carlyle. Goodman Theatre's premiere is agit-prop theater, a trifle that contains more guts and…
CAN A CLONE HAVE AN IDENTITY CRISIS? We share 99% of our genetic material with every other human, 90% with each chimpanzee, and 30% with any bunch of lettuce. (Talk about "six degrees of sep…
PUZZLE PIECES OF A PERSON Snapshots from a family album, jump cuts from a movie, scattered entries from a constant journal"it's hard to get a fix on Mary Page Marlowe, a very different offer…
DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL, DON’T GO Lucas Hnath, a disconcertingly popular scribe, writes playful, pseudo-historical, and narrative-heavy dramas crammed with deliberately stilt…
TWENTY YEARS OF HARD-HEELED HOOFING What Stomp delivered through percussive street-dancing, Forever Tango gave to Argentina’s national cooch dance, and A Chorus Line and 42nd Street…
NOT IN MY DOWNTOWN Mosque Alert, an explosive world premiere, is seen"and felt"from all sides. Jamil Khoury's culture-clashing creation depicts a suburban showdown, a battle over whether to …
DISRUPTION 1633 It's intriguing but frustrating that Bertolt Brecht refuses to dramatize the most potentially powerful moment in The Life of Galileo. (It's like presenting Romeo and Juliet w…
MIND OVER MUSIC Imagine Annie with psychokinetic powers, Nancy Drew as a mind-reader, or Cinderella acting as her own fairy godmother. Self-empowerment of the Mulan persuasion fuels this upb…
BEATEN UP FOR COMING OUT Awesomely authentic, Chelsea M. Warren's setting for after all the terrible things I do isn't just a character in itself"it's a cast. This designer has perfectly con…
BOYS WILL BE PIGS Stop the presses for a late-breaking alert: Men can be crude, drunk, womanizing wretches. This astonishing revelation fuels the bottom-feeding 75 minutes of Caroline M. McG…
MISS MATCH MISMATCH Though it's usually the other way around, sometimes musicals actually improve on the sources that inspire them. Arguably, West Side Story is stronger stuff than Romeo and…
THE WIZARD OF NOTES For half a century Harold Arlen did to notes what Monet made with colors: He found ways to make them make us very happy, equally sad, and never bored. A warm new offering…
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE Grim gray barracks, fortress walls topped with razor wire, smart salutes from sentry towers, cut-away trailers deployed as offices and housing, fluorescent ligh…
THE PRICE OF POPULARITY Westerberg High is pretty low. This Reagan-era preparatory school in Sherwood, Ohio is a cesspool of snobbish belittlement. The Buckeye hellhole includes a witches' t…
SHAW FRACTURES A FAMILY In 1896 George Bernard Shaw wrote You Never Can Tell (the title suggests a plot packed with surprise), his answer to the recently successful The Importance of Being E…
NEW ON NEW The debut of a quartet of new dance pieces was not without some unanticipated excitement. A patron managed to sneak two non-service dogs into the Museum of Contemporary Art's thea…
A TOO-CASUAL CRUELTY Macbeth, Claudius, Goneril, and Iago were monsters–horrible but not actual. Richard III, however, is Shakespeare's vilest historical villain. In his short, ugly re…
THE LAND OF 10,000 TAPS Call us saps or suckers but we can’t, it seems, get enough of "The Understudy Who Becomes A Star." Not when the sweet and satisfying story is stuffed with thril…