Addled Muse Fire Theater: Purgatoire★★★ Saturday, April 15 Durham Central Park, Durham Theater begets theater, dance begets dance. After a group of artists honing their craft coalesce around a director, choreographer, or company, they branch out to start practices of their own. The same is true of cirque and flow arts; a brief online search […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inArt
Revival Is an Intimate, Almost Voyeuristic Look at the Varieties of Religious Experience
REVIVAL Through Sunday, May 7 Ward Theatre Company, Durham www.wardtheatrecompany.com It’s generally good advice for a theater critic to review the performers and not the audience. But Revival, the quirky, atmospheric new work from Ward Theatre Company, renders that counsel null and void. As in last summer’s I Wish You a Boat, director Wendy Ward […]
Posted inArt
Pugilism Gets Political in The Royale, a Cracking Dramatization of “The Fight of the Century”
THE ROYALE Through Sunday, April 23 Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh www.burningcoal.org There’s a magic moment when a gifted boxer whaling on a speedbaga weighted, teardrop-shaped leather sack about the size of a human head, suspended from an overhead standtranscends calisthenics and enters the realm of music. Slowly at first, and then faster, the taped […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: PlayMakers’ My Fair Lady Fleshes Out Edwardian Culture and Cuts Against the Romanticism of the Songs
My Fair Lady ★★★★Through April 29 PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill Education changes everything. That’s one of the reasons George Bernard Shaw’s twist on the Pygmalion tale, adapted as the musical My Fair Lady at PlayMakers Repertory Company, could be something of a tender subject in a region where the transformative powers of learning have […]
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Theater Review: The Harrowing Stories of Global Female Activists Dramatized in Seven: A Documentary Play
Seven: A Documentary Play ★★★ ½ Through April 6 Sonorous Road Theater, Raleigh Works like Seven: A Documentary Play sometimes experience difficulty attracting audiences, not despite their worthy subject matter but because of it. The 2007 project, commissioned by the Washington-based international organization Vital Voices Global Partnership, tasked a septet of playwrights, including MacArthur Foundation […]
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Howard L. Craft Sets a Sensitive, Authentic Family Drama in Durham in The Miraculous and the Mundane
THE MIRACULOUS AND THE MUNDANE ★★★★ Through Saturday, April 1 Manbites Dog Theater, Durham www.manbitesdogtheater.org Attempts to record the human voice didn’t begin with RCA Victor and Edison. Instead, they started with the alphabet. Millennia before the wax cylinder and the phonograph, forgotten artisans fashioned a series of visual symbols to make a lasting record […]
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Theater Review: 13 The Musical Highlights the Absurdity and Occasional Insight of Adolescence
13 The Musical ★★★ North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre Through March 26 Adolescent transitions are already tough. Then life finds little ways to raise the stakes. Evan Goldman, the central character in Jason Robert Brown’s engaging musical, 13, is already facing the expectations and responsibilities surrounding his thirteenth birthday and upcoming bar mitzvah. That’s […]
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Live Comedy Review: Two Months In Elevates Topical Sketch Comedy in the Age of Trump
Two Months In: An Original Sketch Comedy Revue ★★★ ½ Mettlesome The ArtsCenter through March 18 Why is sketch comedy a rarity in the region, despite a robust improvisational comedy community? For starters, different theatrical, literary, and editorial skills are involved in generating the material. Plus there’s a diametrical shift in focus between the two. […]
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Theater Review: Echoes of Tennessee Williams in Bartlett Theater’s Production of Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs From the Table of Joy
Crumbs From the Table of Joy★★★ ½ Through March 12Bartlett Theater at PSI Theatre, Durham An enigmatic narrator is telling a theater audience a poetic but fraught coming-of-age story, looking back at a distant adolescence in a dingy city tenement. In this memory play, the world has outflanked a family of rural Southern transplants and […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: Twelfth Night Returns, Reimagined in Bright Hues Among the Idle Rich
Twelfth Night ★★★ ½ PlayMakers Repertory Company Through March 19 You’ve just survived a shipwreck off the coast of a foreign land in the company of your captain. Immediately, you: (A) collect your wits and belongings and book safe passage home (B) turn transvestite, then seek a position in the court of the local head […]