Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is the one Andrew Lloyd Webber musical I don’t mind seeing again. Webber always comes up with good tunes.  In Joseph, the tunes are unpretentious and frankly pastiche. Webber and Tim Rice, his book and lyrics writer, have fun playing around with popular music styles. I confess I have […]

A Chorus Line is unlike any other musical I can think of. It has no book, no story of boy meets girl, no hero and heroine, no villain, nothing of what usually pulls us into the lives of characters and makes us wait in hope and fear for a happy outcome.

Forest Park isn’t the only park with free Shakespeare this year. Throughout August, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival is bringing a 90-minute version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to 24 public parks in Missouri and Illinois. The wonderful production is the work of TourCo, the Festival’s 20-year-old touring program.

For the second play of Tesseract’s 2022 Summer New Play Series, playwright JM Chambers has chosen a subject that is much in the news but has rarely, to my limited knowledge, been dealt with much on our stages. The subject is mass shootings.

The Tesseract Theatre Company has concentrated its season into a Summer New Play Series. This summer they’ve offered us two new plays. Taylor Gruenloh, the company’s founder, wrote the first, The Length of a Pop Song.

Played properly, as it is at Stray Dog, The Putnam County Spelling Bee takes on considerable substance without losing its light and amusing touch. It’s a very enjoyable way to spend an evening.

The Actors’ Studio’s LaBute New Theatre Festival continued with four more short plays that demonstrated their creators’ ability to shape a satisfying piece of art in a little more than the four panels a comic strip artist uses.

In its first appearance at The Muny, The Color Purple receives a stellar production. The show has a wonderful score by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray and a compelling book by Marsha Norman.

Falstaff is the last opera Verdi completed and one of his greatest achievements. Union Avenue Opera has brought the sparkling comedy to life in a thoroughly delightful production.

In the Heights is one of the best productions ever at Stages St. Louis, if not the best. Every facet of this brilliant staging deserves superlatives.