HAY FEVER June 15–25 TheatreFEST 2017, Raleigh N.C. State’s TheatreFEST 2017 was a gratifying upgrade of the series’s usual summer diet of thrillers, musicals, and low-grade comedies. This season, two biographical works and a classic Noël Coward farce all seemed dedicated to bad behavior among the artistic elites of yesteryear. When the odd patchwork of […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: The Promise of Justice Theater Project’s Porgy and Bess Shines Through the Struggles of Late Personnel Changes
The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess ★★★ Through Sunday, June 25 Umstead Park United Church of Christ, Raleigh When a lead singer is forced to bow out of a performance due to a family medical emergency, we try to catch the show at a different time. But in regional theater’s busiest June in years, there was […]
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ADF Review: The Oldest Piece Made the Biggest Splash in the American Dance Festival’s Opening Night Performance
Opening Night Performance ★★★ ½ June 15, 2017 Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham Though it was the evening’s oldest piece by far, Minus 16 (1999), Ohad Naharin’s Gaga dance manifesto, was among the freshest works in the American Dance Festival’s 2017 opening night performance. That’s not entirely surprising; Naharin intended Gaga to shatter modern dance […]
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Theater Review: The Stonewater Rapture Grapples with Teen Sexuality in a Small, Conservative Town with a Big High School Football Program
The Stonewater Rapture ★★★ Through Friday, June 23 Imurj, Raleigh When playwright Doug Wright focuses on two teenagers grappling with their sexuality and their consciences in a repressive religious culture, The Stonewater Rapture seems like a modern-day (but non-musical) Texas update of Spring Awakening. That’s particularly the case when, in Aggregate Theatre Company’s production at […]
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Fool for Love Is a Promising Start for New Theater Troupe McQueen & Company
FOOL FOR LOVE Through Sunday, June 25 Research Triangle High School Theatre, Durham For some, Father’s Day is more of a reckoning than a celebration, a time for arguing with old ghosts instead of relaxing over burgers and beers. All of which makes Fool for Love, Sam Shepard’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize finalist, the perfect play […]
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The Greeks Streamlines Sophocles’s Theban Trilogy Into Three Nimble, Strikingly Modern One-Acts
THE GREEKS Through Sunday, June 25 CAM Raleigh, Raleigh www.burningcoal.org Throughout Burning Coal Theatre Company’s The Greeks, Ian Finley and Alex Tobey’s nimble and strikingly contemporary adaptation of Sophocles’s Theban trilogy, the playwrights remind us that the gods are capricious in bestowing favors. That was certainly true last Friday night, as the storms that caused […]
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ADF Review: Hillel Kogan’s We Love Arabs Lags Behind a Cultural Conversation Already Well Underway in Our Region’s Performing Arts Scene
Hillel Kogan: We Love Arabs ★★★ ½ Through Saturday, June 17 Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham Perhaps it’s a matter of timing, but it’s hard not to consider Hillel Kogan’s dance-theater farce, We Love Arabs, as something of a step backward in the region’s performing-arts conversation about the presence of Arab people, their cultures, and their […]
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A Dispatch from African Dance Master Baba Chuck Davis’s Moving Memorial Services in Durham
One memorial service wasn’t enough to honor Baba Chuck Davis. Ultimately, three separate commemorative events, hundreds of miles apart, were necessary to properly celebrate the life and achievements of the founder of the African American Dance Ensemble, a world-famous producer, choreographer, and dancer widely regarded, according to The New York Times, as “America’s foremost master […]
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Theater Review: The Amusing Tea with Edie & Fitz Strains to Make Hay From a Gin-Soaked Dust-Up Between Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tea with Edie & Fitz★★★ Through June 18N.C. State’s TheatreFEST, Raleigh When youth conspicuously throws itself at age, a stratagem or two is usually involved. Whether or not brash Jazz Age chronicler F. Scott Fitzgerald actually admired the literary achievements of patrician The Age of Innocence novelist Edith Wharton, he certainly envied her financial success […]
Posted inTheater
A Few Tech Glitches Lingering on Opening Night Didn’t Dim Sonorous Road’s Bright Prospects in Its New Theater
EVERSCAPE Saturday, June 3 Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh www.sonorousroadtheatre.com You make a lot of discoveries the first month you’re in a new place: the sticky door you have to doublecheck, the key you have to jiggle to turn the deadbolt, and the faucet you have to set in a certain position so it doesn’t drip. […]