185 stories by "Alaina Johns"
The BSR Year-End Recommend is back for 2024! Our team shares their favorite movies, books, TV shows, podcasts, newsletters, music, and more.
We offer a huge range of opinions here at BSR, from journalists who know what they're talking about. But this diversity of opinion is built on the value of respect for our shared humanity. W…
Everyone deserves a chance to learn the basics of good PR, especially artists and other independent creators and administrators. Join our November 21 HELP US HELP YOU webinar for tons of tip…
Prolific curator and Streets Dept blog founder Conrad Benner is back with To the Polls 2024, a bi-annual nonpartisan project from Mural Arts urging Philadelphians"who may decide this Preside…
New York solo artist Kaila Galinat made her Philly debut in this year's Fringe with ok, bye!, a standout show that fearlessly explores the universally human experience of rejection. Alaina J…
A Baltimore-based theater company makes its Philly debut with I Will Eat You Alive: A Play in the Form of a Dinner Party, a pro-fat manifesto tackling the cruelties of body discrimination. A…
Chris Davis continues his tradition of audience-pleasing solo Fringe shows with The 40-Year-Old Ballerino, one of his most personal creations to date. Alaina Johns reviews.
The Fringe calendar is always a bit overwhelming: with hundreds of performances throughout the city, where should you begin? Alaina Johns helps out by sharing some of the shows that caught h…
The Philadelphia Fringe Festival happens in venues throughout the city, and this year, more shows are popping up in South Philly than ever before. Alaina Johns rounds up the ones she's hopin…
A Well-Trained Wife, Tia Levings's gripping new memoir about her path in and out of a high-control Christian religion, is also an urgent warning to US voters who care about women's rights. A…
Disability Intimacy, the second essay collection from editor Alice Wong, dives into the ocean of human connection with a disability lens, from dating, sex, and kink to caregiving, parenting,…
Sometimes I think books are the only thing keeping me sane(ish).
Fiction, nonfiction, memoir, a new lens on Jane Austen, anti-marriage
manifestos, and more: here are top recommendations from…
BSR writers are also memoirists, poets, novelists, scholars, and so much more! Discover their books and order a copy to add to your shelves.
Do you love books? We do, too! Philly's literary scene is an important part of our cultural scene, and we spotlight it in our annual BSR Book Week. Learn more here!
Philly's theater community rejoiced at
hearing that the Wilma will receive the 2024 Regional Theatre Tony Award at
this year's ceremony on Sunday, June 16. It's a huge reason to keep fightin…
Mural Arts and First Person Arts teamed up for a show tackling stigma around mental illness and suicide"unusual topics for public storytelling. In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, Ala…
Editor-in-chief Alaina Johns joins forces with contributing critic Josh Herren for a conversation about Theatre Exile's PHILLY GRIT, an exciting trio of solo shows by Philly women artists.
Join us on Zoom for two exciting BSR events: our latest webinar about review-writing on May 29, and a Philly publishing panel with some of our region's top writers and editors on June 6.
Our democracy, our climate, our rights, our health, our wars and protests"it's hard to look at any news at all without feeling like the world is ending. Spend seven minutes with Alaina Johns…
When Quintessence artistic director Alex Burns announced plans for his latest all-male Shakespeare production, he struck a nerve with the local theater community. He talks with Alaina Johns …
In January, the BSR community lost one of our founding members: science-fiction and music writer Tom Purdom. Near the end of his career, he never balked at having a youngster for his editor.…
The Philly nonprofit Art-Reach, which
connects our disability community to our cultural scene, partners with Philadelphia
Theatre Company for Cost of Living, a show about the complexities of…
One drawback of working in the media is that your smallest mistakes are extremely visible to the public. Everyone loves to point out typos and errors, but only some of us are helping. Alaina…
Philly artist Chuck Schultz has been in the audience at concerts, plays, and dance performances throughout 2023. Now he shares the performances through his own eyes in this one-of-kind BSR g…
Did you know that BSR is Philly's top destination for professional arts journalism...and that we're a small, independent nonprofit made up entirely of remote-working part-timers? Here's how …
