Tagged: review

Neurotic writers manipulating their self-aware fictional characters isn’t a new device, but unlike similar stories, The Bard’s Town’s funny and engaging “Chasing Ophelia” isn’t concerned with picking the navel of the writer’s creative processes or artistic tensions. For a romantic comedy, this play’s concerns are remarkably, well, theological: is an unseen, omniscient being really in charge of us, and how do we deal with feeling abandoned by him?

Let’s flash back to 1993, to the days before texting and ready Internet access, when living in a small town really could feel like living on the moon. We are in Nebraska, but it might as well be any small town in Kentucky, Indiana, England. Let us say we are dorks, friendless and stilted, moving through high school like occasionally kicked stray dogs. Or. We are wearing someone else’s life, someone popular and ambitious and accomplished and right, holding our breath until we can leave this town and shed the fake skin like a bad sweater.

Broadway has seen no shortage of iconic, music-fueled films adapted for the stage in recent years, to varying degrees of success. “Sister Act” and “Footloose” met with mixed critical responses, but “Hairspray” knocked the ball out of the park, winning eight Tony Awards.  “Flashdance” is the latest Eighties film to get the Broadway musical treatment, and the musical is previewing with a national tour before it makes its way to New York later this year.

Actor's Choice opened Suzan-Lori Parks' Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "Topdog/Underdog" Thursday in the Henry Clay Theatre. Directed by Kathi E.B. Ellis, this tense, finely-acted two-hander explores the relationship between two adult brothers, Lincoln and Booth, as they struggle with a legacy of abandonment by their parents, masculine identity, racism and the lure of a life of crime.