I wasn’t sure what to expect from “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” Lucas Hnath’s inventive sequel to the Henrik Ibsen classic. What surprised me is how funny it is. Director Darren Sextro, who staged his own adaptation of the Ibsen original in August for Kansas City Actors Theatre, now returns to direct Hnath’s compressed follow-up […]
Funny how productions of older shows so often reflect our present reality. That’s certainly the case with the handsome MTH Theater production of “Ragtime,” the award-winning 1998 musical based on E.L. Doctorow’s novel. Director Tim Scott fills up every inch of the stage at the Crown Center performance venue with people, sound and color. He […]
Well, now. Kansas City Repertory Theatre dishes up a gleaming Cadillac production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” deftly directed, elegantly designed and festooned with vivid performances from one of the best casts you’re likely to see on any stage. Unfortunately, “Cat” doesn’t really rank with Tennessee Williams’ finest works, “A Streetcar Named Desire” […]
Kansas City Actors Theatre tackles Athol Fugard’s “‘Master Harold’. . . and the Boys,” a psychological pressure-cooker set in a provincial South African tea shop on a rainy afternoon, with commendable results. Fugard has called this his most autobiographical play, which is another way of saying everything dramatized onstage — love, respect, fear, betrayal, racial […]
And so, in the end, Nora just did it. She gathered her things, told her husband goodbye, and slammed the door on her way out. In so doing she left not only her spouse, but two young children and an upper middle-class life that came with all the requisite bourgeois benefits. She also made history. […]
Before “Hamilton,” there was “In the Heights,” which marked composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda’s auspicious Broadway debut in 2008. As he would do in “Hamilton,” Miranda incorporated rap and hip-hop into a musically diverse score for this pulsing love-letter to the largely Hispanic community in Washington Heights, a neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan. Whether “In […]
