STAGES & SCREENS

The best production I’ve seen in decades of going to the highly refreshing, nationally notable countryside American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin is running through late September. Nilo Cruz’s  Anna in the Tropics  is one of the most moving of a spate of works I’ve taken in recently about a dying culture facing change from without and within.  Anna  was one of three plays I saw on a sort of mini Midwest theater tour while on vacation this August, including that classic elegy to the 1930s Weimar Republic,  Cabaret,  at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now that we seem to be witnessing a similar moment in our own time, in which half the country celebrates and the other half mourns sweeping changes in the power structure that alter the fabric of society as we know it, the theme is newly poignant. The plays were a resonant follow-up to two of the highlights of my Spring.  Berlin  at the Court Theatre covered the same period ...

No sooner did I publish my last blog post declaring that Shakespeare completists have “perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy” than an even rarer Shakespeare play showed up in my neighborhood: The Two Noble Kinsmen , by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. This weekend and next it is being produced in Forest Park, Illinois by the Forest Theatre Company. As I made clear in that prior article, Henry VI is rarest in the full three-part format; it is often edited into two parts when staged. But The Two Noble Kinsmen is another holy grail for fans of the Bard. In fact, an article in the Forest Park Review reported that one self-described “Shakespeare completist” emailed the production’s artistic director, Richard Corley, to say she is flying in from England just to see this small, free outdoor production because she hasn’t seen it yet. “I have not talked to a single person who’s seen it before,” Corley t...

A little research on the Internet, particularly on Reddit and in The New York Times , shows there are many Shakespeare fans trying to see every one of his plays performed somewhere, somehow, by somebody. Such completists have perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy. The plays are rarely produced, very long, and usually when performed chopped into two plays instead of three. This makes seeing Shakespeare’s trilogy in any form close to his intention almost impossible. I saw the plays in two parts in New York City in 2018 performed by the National Asian American Theatre Company, a credible production. But I hankered to see it in a format that, however edited, retained some character of the playwright’s three-part vision and structure. The fact is, very few of Shakespeare’s fans around the world live in a city like New York and even there it isn’t performed often. So, for completists, the DVD market is essential....

Why hasn’t William Gladstone, a towering figure in British politics who was prime minister four times in the 19 th  Century, been the central character of any film biopics? Why has he been the starring role in only one even remotely significant play, Hugh Ross Williamson's short-lived 1937 show  Mr. Gladstone , which never made it out of London? Why has his arch-rival in British politics, Benjamin Disraeli, been the subject of so many plays and films when by contrast he was only prime minister twice and usually ranks lower in the lists of the best prime ministers in Britain’s history?  The fact is, filmmakers have been so dazzled by Disraeli's positive attributes that both prime ministers have failed to get the interesting, complicated, balanced treatment they deserve. “All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,” American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson was quoted as saying in the  London Review of Books  in 2013, almost 40 years after the last  Dis...

The 2025 Tony Awards were particularly good for regional theater this year – and for plays by, for and about the community they are staged in, a phenomenon that is rare but of which we have a few exciting examples this year. Theater today is notoriously New York-centric. The Pulitzer Prize, for example, reportedly went 85 years before a play that had not yet played in New York was picked, from the first prize ever given for drama (to Why Marry? by Jesse Lynch Williams) in 1918 to 2003’s Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, which was commissioned by and first performed at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida (in the Miami area, not a city widely known for its theater). There have since been very few others, including Fat Ham by James Ijames, which won the Pulitzer while its first off-Broadway production (I saw it at the Public Theatre in New York) was still selling advance tickets. Thanks to the pandemic, it had only been staged in an online video production, by the Wilma Theatre in...

This year the legendary film director Federico Fellini is getting his first box office test since his movies 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita plummeted in the famous 2022 Sight and Sound ranking of the best 250 films of all time, probably thanks to a reckoning on the treatment of women provoked by the “#MeToo” movement. Fellini’s most acclaimed film, 8 1/2 , went from #7 in the 2012 poll to #31 in the 2022 ranking.  La Dolce Vita , meanwhile, went from #36 to #60. Why Fellini’s standing dropped almost certainly has more to do with the controversies surrounding the “#MeToo” movement than it does with a new aesthetic appraisal of his work. A new 35mm print of 8 ½ is running all this week at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre as part of a mini-retrospective called “Five by Fellini,” on the heels of a prolonged and much-extended run for the movie at New York City’s Film Forum this Spring. The Music Box’s five Fellini films include both 8 ½ (1963) and La Dolce Vita (1960), as well as La Strada (1954...

Anyone who has the impression that Broadway musicals are just for theater kids, gays or Manhattan elites with hundreds to spend on a single ticket should travel to the center of the country to check out the The Muny in St. Louis. It just won the Regional Theater Tony Award this month, and I attended for the first time on its opening night on Monday June 16, a day declared “Muny Day” by St. Louis’ mayor to celebrate its new national status and the opening of the new season. What I found was that this 107-year-old, 11,000-seat outdoor theater, the oldest and largest in the country, which gives away 1,500 of its tickets every single summer night – even Broadway is dark on Mondays, but not The Muny! -- to fans devoted enough to spend the day picnicking in Forest Park to get in, is unlike anything else in the country and is a place where, you might say, everyone is a theater kid. While most musicals make millions of dollars per week on Broadway, and are viewed as big commercial enterp...

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis, an underrated gem that gets -- but deserves more -- national attention, celebrated its 50 th anniversary this month with four solid operas that outshine the offerings of larger opera companies in many ways. The Opera Theatre received advance features from The New York Times and the Associated Press for its world premiere this summer of This House , a Harlem-set tale of ghosts and gentrification from composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettists Lynn Nottage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber. But the reviews this summer were mostly local, and I always end up wondering whether St. Louisans realize quite how special an asset this annual festival of four operas really is. It was my second trip to the city to see the offerings there, having been drawn in 2023 by a new production of Treemonisha by Scott Joplin and two other operas. Most of the operas this year beat that year’s selections, which impressed at the time. The f...