In A Night of Chekhov, director Sanio Kurtesevic ambitiously compresses three lesser-known Anton Chekhov works into a brisk evening of comic despair and emotional misfire. While flashes of Chekhov’s wit emerge throughout Swan Song, The Proposal, and The Bear, the ensemble has not yet fully settled into the rhythms of the material, resulting in performances that often feel tentative and uneven.
Hannah Caplan’s This Is Not About Me, a play about creating art, demonstrates the best aspects of collaboration: a smart script, captivating direction, immersive set design, and wonderful performances. Caplan’s dialogue crackles with wit and insight, while director Douglas Clarke-Wood allows the play’s 20-plus scenes and multiple storylines to flow beautifully. The result is a production that is joyful, funny, and a delight for both the ear and the eye.
Before the age of global pop stardom, there was Harry Lauder—a kilted powerhouse of British music hall and vaudeville whose songs and irrepressible personality made him one of the most beloved entertainers of the early 20th century. In Lauder: Scotland’s Kilted King of Broadway, Jamie MacDougall brings this larger-than-life figure back to the stage with infectious warmth and musical flair that turns biography into jubilant theatrical celebration.
After Pulitzer Prize–winning plays in 1938 (Our Town) and 1942 (The Skin of Our Teeth), Thornton Wilder, in his remaining 33 years of life, didn’t write another full-length, original play. Our Town, likely the most produced American play of all time, still burns brightly, undimmed by the passing decades. It is, then, no mystery why the allure of The Emporium, an unfinished Wilder play that exists in 360 handwritten pages at Yale’s Beinecke Library, called, Siren-like, to playwright Kirk Lynn, who has undertaken the task of assembling, interpreting, and finishing it. The result is a road full of cracks and bumps, but one that leads somewhere impossible to forget.
British fascism may have preceded Hitler and Mussolini, but those dictators inspired homegrown demagogues who reveled in mass rallies and mobilized Blackshirts to harass and terrorize impoverished immigrants. Tim Gilvin’s and Alex Kanefsky’s musical Cable Street recounts, in scenes alternating between the modern day and 1936, how British fascism turned out differently, as residents of London’s multicultural East End united to deter a right-wing rally on their turf.
In A Night of Chekhov, director Sanio Kurtesevic ambitiously compresses three lesser-known Anton Chekhov works into a brisk evening of comic despair and emotional misfire. While flashes of Chekhov’s wit emerge throughout Swan Song, The Proposal, and The Bear, the ensemble has not yet fully settled into the rhythms of the material, resulting in performances that often feel tentative and uneven.
