photo courtesy REPChris Milner, Ryan Brock, and Hazel Edmond in REP’s Dark Play DARK PLAY, or STORIES FOR BOYS4 StarsRaleigh Ensemble PlayersThrough May 2 [email protected]: @byronwoods Facebook: arts.byron.woods Once it was believed that the Internet would connect us together, individually as well as a culture, in ways unimagined before—and in some ways, it has. But […]
Review
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A Wickedly entertaining modern-day political allegory: Wicked at DPAC
photo by Joan MarcusDon Amendolia as the Wizard of Oz in Wicked Wicked 4.5 starsDPACThrough May 16 By now, they’re the kind of marketing metaphors we’ve all probably become numb to: Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Terminator. Christian Bale is Batman. Reese Witherspoon is Legally Blonde. But having seen the professional touring version of the Broadway […]
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A Master Class in Artistic Survival: SECCA at Burning Coal
Aaron Mills & PJ Maske in SECCA Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts (SECCA)4 StarsBurning Coal TheatreThrough May 1 It had been a long day of rehearsals. Thankfully the show had reached its continental divide several days before: that meridian every production crosses—every fortunate one, at least—where the thought of roomfuls of strangers seeing what you’ve […]
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Home is Far Too Many Stories: Hidden Voices at ArtsCenter
Home is Not One Story2 StarsHidden VoicesClosed Apr. 10 Byron [email protected]: @byronwoods Facebook: arts.byron.woods In a recent review I decried a production that, like humanity in the famous T.S. Eliot quote, could not “bear very much reality.” Unfortunately, Home is Not One Story, the latest stage production by Hidden Voices at The ArtsCenter, is its […]
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Director’s double duty blurs “Sty of the Blind Pig”
The Sty of the Blind Pig2 stars Shaw Players and CompanyMeymandi Theater, Murphey School, Polk Street.Through Closed Apr. 4, 2010 Byron [email protected] Twitter: @byronwoods Facebook: arts.byron.woods There’s just one problem with that second scene in Act II of Sty of the Blind Pig, Phillip Dean’s 1971 Chicago domestic tenement drama which closed with an Easter […]
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One-man “Gospel of John” show plays Chapel Hill Friday. Too bad its playbill and Web site bear false witness…
Brad Sherrill in “The Gospel of John” The Gospel of JohnUniversity United Methodist ChurchApril 2, 7 p.m.www.chapelhilluumc.org/uumc/tickets It happens every so often in this business: A company just a little too desperate for praise distorts a critical review in its publicity for a show, by cherry-picking a positive word or phrase out of an article […]
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Is “A Remarkable Document” Remarkable Enough?
Actor Joy Jones I Have Before Me A Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda3 1/2 starsPRC 2Kenan Theater, UNC Through Mar. 28 Usually, determining a play’s subject is something of a preliminary task: one that leads us, more or less directly, into deeper critical waters. But within the past week, […]
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Fighting temperamental scorpions, impossible odds – and the age of jade: David Copperfield at DPAC
Magician David Copperfield‘s greatest adversary isn’t the sort of technical snafu that reportedly had him scrub one of the most amazing effects from his 5:30pm performance of An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion at DPAC yesterday afternoon: a 50’s model Lincoln convertible that we saw him, somehow, suddenly producenot only out of thin air but […]