Little Carol Klein of Brooklyn, New York, did herself proud when she blossomed into songwriter Carole King. In 2013 her hit-parade of a life came to Broadway as Beautiful: The Carole King Mu…
Can't help lovin' that Show Boat at Toby’s Dinner Theatre. Modern audiences are still likely to find the miscegenation drama that sets the story in motion more dramatically engaging th…
From time to time in the mock-Edwardian musical farce A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder you may be reminded of the inspired antics of an old "Carol Burnett Show." When actor John Raps…
There's something fundamentally spiritual about the legend of RMS Titanic. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole there are few to be found aboard an ocean liner going down fast in icy w…
Red Branch Theatre in Columbia has an early present for young audiences this season. On opening night of Harry Connick Jr.'s The Happy Elf, many of those in the next generation of theater-lo…
Ebenezer Scrooge would be a terror on Facebook. He’s just not your social media type of guy. Bahhumbug would be his Twitter log-on. And if he's your boss, like poor Bob Cratchit, don't…
Humorist Jean Shepherd left us in 1999 but his folksy memories of being a child in Indiana at Christmas time live delightfully on in A Christmas Story: The Musical. Now making its Baltimore …
In its area premiere of American Hero, Rep Stage has sent out a likable little David to do battle with the soulless Goliath of modern corporate culture. While playwright Bess Wohl accomplish…
It's anyone's guess what the late Oscar Hammerstein would make of it, but we are now getting our first close look at Oscar's modest Eisenhower-era TV musical Cinderella all buffed up and ret…
Evil Dead: The Musical is ideal for those theatergoers who always found The Rocky Horror Show just too darned serious. No need to give this show a big hand " it already has one as a recurrin…
In the bright and tuneful world of jukebox musicals there are your basic pizza joints that sell by the slice and the hot-diggity neighborhood kitchens that dish up the whole pie. Jersey Boys…
Nuns are more fun in the round. That's a catechism we learned at Toby's Dinner Theatre via Nunsense and other shows so many times it became an article of faith. Now Toby's is up to its wimpl…
Today's playgoers are used to solving puzzles in the theater. So perhaps Playwright Sharr White spends a bit longer than necessary to get us to The Other Place promised by the title of his 2…
If ever our world needed a story of uplift, peace and redemption as told by a repentant old war general, it's now. But this time around at the movies, sorry to say, General Lew Wallace's cla…
High school can be rough on anyone, but in Heathers it's murder. The well-mounted area premiere at Red Branch Theatre Company shows that the 1989 movie, which poked fun at making the grade i…
Talk about age-appropriate casting: Love Letters, a play about the 50-year relationship between a man and a woman, is now at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore starring a man and a woman…
Love is breaking out in Baltimore. Or should we say the "second time around"? Nearly 50 years after starring together in Love Story, Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal have brought A.R. Gurne…
You might never guess that the Beauty and the Beast company now at Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre has been on the road for well over a year. It is a musical of enchanted transformations, and…
Randy Harrison is raising a bit of hell as the Emcee for Cabaret in midtown Baltimore. I mean, just take a look at that demented, Chucky doll leer. He knows the Devil has his back, and befor…
Toby’s Dinner Theatre has every right to crow about its new staging of Peter Pan. The classic Broadway musical based on James M. Barrie's 1904 evergreen is deceptively simple " after a…
Red Branch Theatre Company has dubbed its new season "Paint It Red" with an eye toward the blood and mayhem in its selected slate of musicals. Up and running now is Sweeney Todd: The Demon B…
Nostalgia for the rigors of big-city apartment hopping is the last thing one expects to find out in the suburbs of Howard County. But Rep Stage offers up that and more with its D.C.-area pre…
Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre has reassurance for anyone out there asking where the magic went. Its "direct from Broadway" engagement of The Illusionists is packed full of caped conjurers, …
The music of Motown is a gift that keeps on giving. In 2013, Motown: The Musical wrapped up big chunks of that songbook and armfuls of personal charisma in rainbows of light tied with wide s…
The fabulously theatrical set for Rep Stage's Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts is so overwhelming you might not realize for a time that the play itself belongs to a more recent tradition …