There’s a new theater company in town and its artistic leadership is apparently unafraid to open a play in the midst of a pandemic. Venture Out Theatre’s inaugural production, an
The brain trust at MTH Theater has found a way to reach an audience, even in the depths of a pandemic. Following up the company’s classy video production of “An
As the theater community reels from a community-wide shutdown ordered by public officials on both sides of the state line, artistic leaders are faced with two questions: How long? What
Kansas City Repertory Theatre offers a handsomely mounted production of “Fun Home,” the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about growing up in uniquely dysfunctional family in Pennsylvania. The show, adapted by Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music) racked up an array of awards in 2014-15, including five Tonys. While the […]
The Coterie’s production of “The White Rose: We Defied Hitler” by David Meyers hums with relevance. The one-act drama depicting the interrogation of Sophie Scholl, a young resister in Nazi Germany who was tried for treason and executed for distributing anti-Hitler leaflets, will almost certainly bring to mind young people in the here and now. […]
Kansas City Actors Theater pairs two of the city’s best performers for its production of “‘night Mother,” the drama that established playwright Marsha Norman’s national reputation. Her two-character mother-daughter work that deals frankly with the shattering effects of suicide won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Performed in just over 90 minutes without an intermission, […]
Forge Repertory Theatre, one of the newer small theater companies in Kansas City, kicks off its inaugural season with Eric Overmyer’s “On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning,” a comic meditation on language, perception and intuition first staged in 1985. As far as I know, this is the first local production of Overmyer’s script, […]
My regular readers know that my tolerance for plays about the theater is extremely low, but every now and then I run across a happy exception. The Unicorn Theatre (in collaboration with UMKC Theatre) offers up a well-acted production of Theresa Rebeck’s ambitious “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” in which the playwright toys with the historical fact that French […]
And so once again audiences are invited to bear witness to the spiritual transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge from penny-pinching cynic to warm-hearted benefactor to the poor. And again theatergoers fill virtually every available seat to see Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s annual take on “A Christmas Carol,” the 1843 novella by Charles Dickens, who used his […]
