Tagged: review

Actors Theatre opened the “Dracula” crypt Friday for its 18th consecutive Halloween season run. Directed and adapted by William McNulty, the play is based on Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel about a mysterious count from Transylvania who terrorizes a seaside town in England.

The Broadway in Louisville production of the smash hit “Wicked” opened Thursday at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts. The Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical depicts the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good, polar opposite witches from the classic tale “The Wizard of Oz,” as schoolgirls struggling with their ambitions, convictions and loyalty in an oppressive political climate.

The new season at Actors Theatre of Louisville is off to a rousing start with an energized and stylish contemporary production of William Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet.” The season opener is both a homecoming for the director, Louisville native Tony Speciale, and a bright sign of things to come for the theater with new artistic director Les Waters at the helm.

There was a time when summer didn't yield such an abundance of theatrical riches in Louisville, with the big houses dark and maybe a handful of small company revivals to sustain us through the long humid season.

The Bard’s Town Theatre broadens its focus this season with an outstanding production of Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Bright New Boise.” This tightly-wound family drama about a disgraced evangelical who takes a job at an Idaho Hobby Lobby won an Obie Award in 2011 and has enjoyed a number of exciting regional premieres over the last season by companies like Washington, D.C.’s Wooly Mammoth Theatre and Chicago’s LiveWire.

A dark secret haunts a rural Illinois farmhouse where a once-proud family molders in disgrace in Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Buried Child.” The play is sometimes described as a dark comedy, and its humor does serve to occasionally diffuse the almost stifling tension that pervades the play. But ultimately, “Buried Child” is a disorienting tragedy about the dissolution of the American family and the legacy of shame that causes one household to unravel and curl violently inward.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. 2,500 years after Aristophanes first suggested women could end a war by kicking powerful husbands out of their beds in “Lysistrata,” the idea is still compelling to playwrights and politicians alike (a Michigan state representative recently suggested a similar strategy).