Tag: Vol. 34 No. 7

November 2 be damned: we can laugh again thanks to this delightfully dysfunctional duo. Seth Thomas is the brainy, patient black brother and Paul Thomas (no relation) his lunkheaded, not-so-silent white sidekick. Their crackerjack hour includes a ghetto version of Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on first?” routine, a film shoot ruined by a white […]

August Strindberg’s 1907 chamber play about a woman who has an abnormally close relationship with her son-in-law is at once hyperrealistic–some dialogue resembles a verbatim transcript of conversation–and so bizarre as to leave reality far behind. At one point two characters engage in an ecstatic discussion as they’re being burned alive. It’s beyond me why […]

If the text in this ensemble-created work sounds familiar at times, it’s because the piece is a montage–assembled via a process Free Street calls a mash-up–of lyrics sampled from songwriters as diverse as 50 Cent, Toby Keith, Elliott Smith, and Cole Porter. Given the way pop songs have permeated our national consciousness, rhyme and meter […]

Bad songs covered badly can be amusing–and Romuva Productions’ cabaret-theater piece, which includes such gems as “Physical” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” certainly has that going for it. Len Jenkin’s script is a mishmash of hallucinatory images that range from dull to disturbing as Spin and Marlene Milton, a divorced couple, do their thing […]

Conceived and directed by Sharon Greene, this noble meditation on noble futility–written and performed by Greene, Shawn Huelle, and Jay Torrence–has its heart in the right place but never quite achieves the associative synergy it seeks. Riffing elliptically off Cervantes’s novel rather than retracing, recasting, or unpacking it, the performers intertwine two main narratives: one […]