By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") The national tour of Back to the Future: The Musical materialized onto the stage of the Saenger Theater this week and left wakes of la…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") The national tour of Back to the Future:The Musical materialized onto the stage of the Saenger Theater this week and left wakes of lau…
By LOU HARRY Based on a documentary, The Queen of Versailles, the new Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino musical on Broadway at the St. James Theatre concerns an amoral, in-it-for-herse…
By LOU HARRY Musicals tend not to be humble. With rare exceptions, they announce themselves whether with well-known performers, high-profile source material, energetic dance, or visual spect…
By LOU HARRY Thanks to its notorious David Merrick-produced/Patti LuPone-starring died-on-the-road 1976 tryout, the Steven Schwartz/Joseph Stein musical "The Baker's Wife" landed a reputatio…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") At the beginning of Bess Wohi's play Liberation, the character of Lizzie breaks the fourth wall to greet the expectant audience. She m…
'By LOU HARRY Instead of praising our goulash, They're appraising the plays of Willie Mays. In the original production of Dawn Yankees, that's a lyric sung by Meg Boyd and other neglected wi…
By ROY BERKO The Notebook: The Musical tells the heart warming, and often heartbreaking life-long love story, of Allie and Noah.  It is based on a true tale inspired by author Nicholas…
By SCOTTY BENNETT Hard to Say by Kyle Ayers is a stand-up comedy show about dealing with chronic " at times " nearly intractable pain. In Ayers' case, it is caused by a nerve disorder called…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") When Arthur Miller debuted The Crucible in 1953, the nation was emerging from the dark and sinister times of accusations and recrimina…
By ANNE SIEGEL SPRING GREEN, Wis. " There's no better time for out-of-state visitors to head towards Wisconsin than right now. Some people might stay at campgrounds, others may find a secret…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Jamie Wax's play Call Me Izzy is set in Mansfield, Louisiana, some three to four hours away from where he grew up in Baton Rouge and N…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") It is perhaps most appropriate that for the third jewel in Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane's studded crown is Carousel, the Rodgers and…
By SCOTTY BENNETT Storytellers are artists who use a palette of verbal and physical effects to paint, in sound and motion, the picture the wordsmith creates in words on a page. David Dean Bo…
By ALAN SMASON This season's New Orleans Shakespeare Festival has been quite unusual. To begin with, the first of its two major productions wasn't even Shakespeare: it was Moliére and his f…
By LOU HARRY There are expectations that come when a play explicitly centers on death " particularly a play with a doom-and-gloom title such as the one attached to Noah Diaz's play You Will …
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") Julie Benko turned in a perfect performance as Eliza Doolittle in a concert version of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady opposite Broadw…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") It's taken ten years for the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans (TWTC) to unveil its first production of Tennessee Will…
By LOU HARRY After a few days at the Stratford Festival, I stopped in at the Shaw Festival for the first time in a dozen years. Visiting the festival and the charming town made me regret tho…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") When Company by Stephen Sondheim (and a book by Mark Furth) opened on Broadway in 1970 it was such a breath of fresh air and so unlike…
By LOU HARRY You don't need to go to an amusement park to have the feeling of riding a roller coaster. In Stratford, Ontario, you can acquire something akin to whiplash at a festival where y…
By SCOTTY BENNETT A famous line from the John Ford film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" is spoken by the newspaper reporter character, Maxwell Scott, near the end of the film, after heari…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") In Pirates! The Penzance Musical, Rupert Holmes proves he knows how to take a popular hit, re-set it in an improbable location and…
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic ("Steppin' Out") There are times when a local production company attempts to put on a treasured musical theatre piece and it collapses under the weight…
By ROY BERKO Like the old tale, my lord: "it is not so, nor `t was not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so." The intimate Beck's Studio Theatre is a perfect venue for meeting and gre…