Experimental reality show at the Citadel reveals our true selves – and it’s not pretty
It’s Fight Night – and we’ve been conditioned to expect what comes next. It’s a boxing match. There’s a ring. A pool of light. A mic drops down from the darkness and a droll soft-spoken dude in a suit and bow tie announces the battle to come. What follows seems to be a random series […]
REVIEW: The Color Purple gets superb treatment it deserves at the Citadel
When I first saw the Broadway production of The Color Purple adapted from Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller, I was unimpressed. As is often the way with Broadway, when they get their hands on an intimate story they produce the living daylights out of it. Walker’s tale is certainly a decade-spanning epic but […]
REVIEW: RING OF FIRE: The Music of Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash was born in a shack in Arkansas and grew up on a hardscrabble farm. He started his career as a rockabilly singer in Memphis but from then on followed a path that was all his own. He defiantly turned his back on the growing glitz of what was called “country” music to join […]
REVIEW: Banned in Iran, Nassim an experimental trip at the Citadel
Nassim Soleimanpour is something of a world-wide theatrical phenomenon. The Iranian playwright now has several international hits to his credit. Alas, his own country has never seen his work – he’s banned back home. His latest play, simply titled Nassim, has played in many venues including both the West End and Off-Broadway – where it […]
THE TEMPEST: Shakespeare all shook up at the Citadel
Citadel Artistic Director Daryl Cloran promised us a “Reimagine Season” this year – and has largely validated that mandate. He is closing his year with an elemental, uncompromising, inventive staging of Shakespeare’s last great play, The Tempest – performed by hearing and deaf actors in both English and American Sign Language. It certainly demonstrates how […]
REVIEW: Mad Mad Mad Mad World at the Citadel!
“We are all walk-ons in other people’s lives,” British playwright Alan Ayckbourn once said. It sounds really wacky – the Citadel is presenting a theatrical concept that boggles the mind. It’s two interconnected full-length plays that add up to one comedy. The two run at the same time in two different theatres with different audiences, […]
Slight of Mind takes flight of fancy at the Citadel – just not in a theatre
A couple of years back when current Artistic Director Daryl Cloran first arrived at the Citadel, he kept getting lost. Joe Shoctor’s big brick playhouse had empty rooms, long hallways and all sorts of dark nooks and crannies. Never one to let a theatrical idea go to waste, Cloran searched for a vehicle that would […]
THEATRE PEOPLE: Jesse Lipscombe running race
Jesse Lipscombe is perfect for the Citadel Theatre’s latest madcap adventure – two political comedies running simultaneously in two different theatres inside the building, one in the Maclab, one in The Club on the third floor, with the same characters played by the same actors – who have to literally run up and down the […]
PLAYBOT: Women in theatre!
A quick analysis of other PlayBots in both local and foreign domains reveals a surprising fact: In recent times there have been as many good roles for women as there have been for men. Lots of plays with strong female characters, lots of productions written, directed and produced by women. A correction has occurred! Yet […]
PLAYBOT: La Boheme Rhapsody
You could argue that the decadent, hard-living, unprotected sex-having “bohemian” culture of the late 1970s led directly to the tragic circumstances depicted in the musical Rent – which is set 10 years later and loosely based on the Puccini opera La Boheme, which was written 100 years earlier. In a further time twist, we return […]
MATILDA: It’s the adults that are revolting in delightful Citadel musical
What a joyful, merry, nasty, chaotic and thoroughly enjoyable romp is this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical, currently settling in for three more weeks at the Citadel Theatre. The much-awarded winning musical is still playing in London’s West End. It was a big hit on Broadway, and it was there that Citadel artistic […]
PLAYBOT: We Are Not Alone talks ALIENS
Before Drake was cut off at the Grammy Awards, he was about to deliver a talk on his famous Drake Equation, estimating the odds of Earth being visited by aliens. Oops, wrong Drake. It was American astrophysicist Frank Drake who came up with an algorithm in 1961. Do the math from these (somewhat paraphrased) variables: […]
