NC DANCE FESTIVAL Thursday, Oct. 12, 8 p.m., $15–$22 The Rickhouse, Durham www.danceproject.org EMERGENCE Saturday, Oct. 14, 3 & 8 p.m., $7–$10 PSI Theatre, Durham www.triangledanceproject.org Particularly in the dance world, change does not take place in a vacuum. A development in one area, for good or ill, can send ripples out across the practice. […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inArt
In Cary Players’ Guys and Dolls, Director Nancy Rich Elicits Notable but Uneven Work from Her Cast
GUYS AND DOLLS Through Sunday, Oct. 8 Cary Arts Center, Cary www.caryplayers.org There were giants in those days, hardboiled hoods and gentlemen gangsters; gamblers, goons, and chiselers of the first rank; and confidence men who knew that if you were running a hustle near Times Square, it behooved you to do so in sharp menswear, […]
Posted inArt
Romeo and Juliet Underscores How Generational Trauma Weighs on the Young in Twelfth-Century Verona and Today
ROMEO AND JULIET Through Sunday, Oct. 22 Forest Theatre Chapel Hill www.baretheatre.org Conservative firebrands lament that our youth are losing their innocence earlier and earlier, victims of television, films, the Internet, and a permissive culture. Images of a teenage gangster holding a gun or an adolescent girl in provocative garb supposedly reveal failings unique to […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: The South Is Hard to Hear in the Opera Version of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain★★½ Thursday, Sep. 28, 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 1, 2 p.m. UNC’s Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill It’s a first principle of adaptation: the main reason to translate an artwork into another medium is to explore it more fully, to draw out facets its first form could not. Ultimately, an adaptation stands or falls on […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: At Sonorous Road, Sandi Toksvig’s Silver Lining Is a Needed but Shaky Showcase for Older Female Actors
Silver Lining★★½ Through Sunday, Oct. 1 Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh True confession: it’s still a thrill when a new theater company hangs out its shingle, and the fewer names I recognize on a press release or playbill, the greater my curiosity is. That was particularly true of Peony Productions and its first project, the dark […]
Posted inArt
Local Playwright Howard L. Craft Ships Freight Off-Broadway
In Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green, by Raleigh-based playwright Howard L. Craft, a series of trains running through the last century inexorably carry the title character to his fate. Next month, they’ll take him somewhere he’s never been before: off-Broadway. The New Federal Theatre announced last week that its production of the existential […]
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A Second Chance for Women’s Theatre Festival Cancellation Miss Lulu Bett
Shows rarely get second chances in the theater. It’s hard enough to synchronize participants’ busy lives for one set of rehearsals and performances; doing it twice is nearly impossible if something goes wrong the first time. Nevertheless, two months after the Women’s Theatre Festival had to cancel its August production of the early feminist play […]
Posted inArt
Prattle Not with Monsters: Frankenstein and His Creation Talk It Out in Playing with Fire
Playing with Fire Through Sunday, Oct. 8 Theatre in the Park, Raleigh www.theatreinthepark.com It’s the endgame every chess player dreads: a board with only two pieces left. When players are equally matched, the stratagems of troop reductionmurder by gameplay, in other wordsresult in the irresolvable equilibrium of a stalemate. Or do they? As with Nick […]
Posted inTheater
The Cake Edits Reality to Ignore the Everyday Consequences of Bible Belt Homophobia
THE CAKE Through Sunday, Oct. 1 PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill www.playmakersrep.org Bekah Brunstetter’s new drama, The Cake, is a rare thing in our current moment: a calculated apologia for conservative Southern Christianity and the antigay bigotry its practitioners have inculcated in their familiesand have attempted, through legislation, to impose on everyone else. This is […]
Posted inArt
Closer Than They Appear Probes the Cutting Edges of Virtual Reality, the Military, and PTSD Treatment
CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR Through Sunday, Oct. 1 UNC’s Swain Hall, Chapel Hill As my family gathered to mourn my uncle’s death, cable news was stuck in a loop. An endless procession of commercial aircraft crashed into waiting skyscrapers. It was September 12, 2001, and the trauma was being permanently burned into American psyches on […]