Seven years before the Pulitzer Prize-winning global phenomenon that is HAMILTON opened on Broadway in 2015 and blew the roof off staged musicals forever, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda's first Broadway musical the Tony Award-winning IN THE HEIGHTS opened in the same theater in 2008. Now, like "Hamilton," it's also a movie, a glorious movie more powerful [...]
This is the best virtual theater I've seen all pandemic: chekhovOS/an experimental game/. Conceived and directed by Arlekin Players Theatre founder and artistic director Igor Golyak, this production melds live and pre-taped theater, video, film, and gaming technology into a hybrid that unlocks a new way of understanding the world of Chekhov's plays, even as [...]
I've always had a weakness for villainesses. Sleeping Beauty was a snooze compared to the magnificent Maleficent. I adored Snow White; still her ravishing wicked queen of a stepmother was disturbingly alluring. Even that green-complected shrew on a broom who threatened Dorothy, the Wicked Witch of the West (the sheer power of that woman with [...]
BLACK BEANS PROJECT the latest virtual undertaking presented by The Huntington is a delicious digital offering and one of the most effective theater experiences offered in a medium tough to scale for theater-goers craving intimacy and drama. This world premiere one act, two-hander created by Huntington artist-in-residence and Elliot Norton Prize-winner Melinda Lopez and Joel [...]
BREWMANCE is a tale of a love affair with beer-- but not my father's beer, and Chet and his brothers, my uncles, LOVED beer. They would sit around the backyard at all the family gatherings--barbecues to baptisms--drinking cases of the stuff. A cousin once drove in from out of state for a family funeral arriving [...]
After a two month pandemic-induced delay, the OSCARS will happen this SUNDAY NIGHT April 25 at 8 p.m. (ET/5 p.m. PT) on ABC. The 93rd annual Academy Awards honors all things movies! I have reported live from THE red carpet over the course of 20 years as the A & E Anchor for WBZ-TV (CBS- [...]
I raved about HYPE MAN: a break beat play by Idris Goodwin at its 2018 world premiere directed onstage by Company One's artistic director Shawn LaCount. Now, as George Floyd haunts and Daunte Wright brings us to flash point again, this urgent piece of theater brings a too familiar tragedy right to our screens and [...]
I have loved Tina Turner from the first moment I saw her perform. It may have been her very first TV appearance in 1960 on "American Bandstand." I surely saw her one and only appearance with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1970. I had no context for what [...]
As part of Women's History Month--I was honored to once again participate in WOMEN WRITERS WEEK at RogerEbert.com. Check out all the terrific articles there by women writers, and read mine below, reposted with a few new edits. Enjoy! It is surely among the finest series ever produced for TV and also among the most [...]
Some movies are torture. "Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar" is like jumping off a comedy cliff and finding yourself forever cringing in the world where jokes never land. Even Kristen Wiig can't save you. Some movies are about torture. THE MAURITANIAN is a film that doesn't tell us anything we didn't already [...]
