DOG SEES GOD: CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE BLOCKHEAD Through Sunday, Oct. 1 North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre, Raleigh It’s a mistake to consider Dog Sees God a satire of Peanuts. Rather, Bert V. Royal’s dark comedy is an extension of Charles Schulz’s beloved creation. At the comic strip’s creative height in the sixties and […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: After His Audacious Hamlet, Director Jeremy Fiebig Makes Another Theatrical Gamble in King Lear
King Lear★★ Through Sep. 24 William Peace University’s Leggett Theatre, Raleigh There’s a moment near the end of King Lear when the blind Earl of Gloucester wonders if he’s been misled. Though he has asked a companion to lead him to the edge of a dramatic precipice, the ground underfoot seems less than mountainous. Regrettably, […]
Posted inGuides
Fall into Theater
The recent or impending closures of high-profile theaters like Common Ground and Manbites Dog aren’t slowing down the Triangle’s theater artists this fall, who offer everything from an operatic adaptatation of Charles Frazier to a riff on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. COLD MOUNTAIN Sep. 28–Oct. 1, N.C. Opera/Carolina Performing Arts at […]
Posted inTheater
Despite the Implosion of Miss Lulu Bett, the Women’s Theatre Festival Made Major Gains in Year Two
There’s a delicate, dangerous moment in artists’ development when they can see only the mistakes in their creations. Women’s Theatre Festival artistic director Ashley Popio is brooding over brunch, shortly after the close of the festival’s second summer season. She founded North Carolina’s first women’s theater festival last year, organizing hundreds of volunteers to produce […]
Posted inArt
Even an Oblivious Birthday Party Didn’t Derail ShakesBEER, Bare Theatre’s Boozy Travesty of the Bard
ShakesBEER Through Monday, Sep. 11 Imurj, Raleigh/Mystery Brewing, Hillsborough www.baretheatre.org There are a dozen local dives where Bare Theatre’s tribute to Shakespearean dipsomania would not go over, and not all of them are accessorized in chicken wire or early Harley-Davidson. Last Tuesday, I wondered if Fullsteam Brewery might be one of them. A beery birthday […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: Count Dispels the Anesthetic of Distance from Death Row
Count★★★½Closed Aug. 27 Kenan Theatre, Chapel Hill Distance is a powerful anesthetic. The farther we live from neighborhoods blighted by the ammoniac stench of a commercial hog farm’s waste lagoons, for example, the less likely we are to feel their pain. If we never see the bodies crippled by black lung, which is on the […]
Posted inArt
One of Those Rare, Special Nights at the Theater with Gospel Musical and “Hat Queen” Ode Crowns
CROWNS Through Sunday, Sep. 17 Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh www.raleighlittletheatre.org You can tell when an audience isn’t just enjoying a show, but is in communion with it. They don’t wait for the end of the scene to applaud; instead, it happens spontaneously, mid-line, as refreshing as cool rain. When actors tell the undisputed truth about […]
Posted inArt
Incarcerated Voices Speak Through Two Current Theater Productions, Count and Conversations with Hitler
COUNT Wednesday, Aug. 23–Sunday, Aug. 27, 7:30 p.m., $15–48 Kenan Theatre, Chapel Hill www.playmakersrep.org CONVERSATIONS WITH HITLER Through Saturday, Sep. 2 Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh www.sonorousroad.com If you wind up on death row anywhere in the United States, one of two things is going to happen, according to playwright Lynden Harris: “Either you go crazy […]
Posted inArt
Wants Upon a Time Is a Commedia Dell’arte Interrogation of What Happily Ever After Really Means
WANTS UPON A TIME Friday, August 25, 6:30 & 7 p.m., free Hillsborough Riverwalk, Hillsborough Sixteenth-century Italy probably isn’t the first place you’d think to look for experimental filmmaker and futuristic multimedia artist Francesca Talenti. Nor might you have imagined the piquant postmodern playwright, who we last saw programming a thespian robot for her 2013 […]
Posted inTheater
Will the Closure of Manbites Dog, a Trailblazing Company and Essential Venue, Push Independent Theater Out of Durham?
We almost didn’t get to spend the last two decades with Manbites Dog Theater, a provocative, entertaining mainstay of the Triangle’s independent theater community. According to artistic director Jeff Storer and managing director Ed Hunt, an ungainly stack of wooden platforms made all the difference. They built the platforms thinking they’d be portable enough to […]