By the time William Shakespeare got around to writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, recorded Western theater had been packing ’em in for about 20 centuries.

Tracy Turnblad’s mom Edna is so fat that she eventually had to let her shower curtain out. Now, that’s fat.

Composer Jeff Bowen and librettist Hunter Bell didn’t know it, but they created the theater’s take on reality TV when they wrote [title of show]. The selfdescribed “musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical” is as reality TV as reality TV gets, loopy with the affectations that come with people caught in the act of impersonating themselves. Bowen and Bell starred in the off-Broadway and Broadway entries, which lent another layer of authenticity to the tale its PR machine dubs “a love letter to musical theater.”
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A 2005 analysis of a clump of hair from King George III, England’s toppest of the top during the American Revolution, shows the regent probably suffered from chronic hepatic porphyria. That’s your doc’s way of saying he struggled with big-time bouts of madness and paranoia, ulcerated skin, spasms of the muscles and veins, fierce diarrhea and abdominal pain and a pesky tendency to discharge purple pee and poop. Against those odds, the war must’ve been a stroll through the vegetable aisle—as an abjectly terrified George wailed during one onset, “I’m not going out of my mind! My mind is going out of me!”
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Like all hard-line Christians, Gene can barely breathe under the weight of his two crosses—the one he wears on his sleeve to declare his faith and the one that governs his life, which resides inextricably up his ass. The latter is much the larger, crafted from decades of Church-fueled guilt and held together by memories of a family’s violent dysfunction. Gene’s faith is a figment of his blunted, ugly imagination—and now that God has hit him with a real-life left hook, true Christian peace is more elusive than ever.
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Despite what he’d have you think, King Lear’s worst enemy is not daughter Cordelia, whom the eponymous ruler disowns in a world-class hissy-fit. It’s William Shakespeare, of all people. The story—about an aging, sloppily sentimental, mentally sketchy English regent who seeks to bequeath his kingdom to his three girls in return for their vows of love—isn’t exactly the playwright’s best, because the secondary characters’ richness almost scuttles the plot en route to a life of its own.
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Except for the total waste of talent, Vox Nova’s Arrow to the Heart isn’t bad

Teachers should take their students to InnerMission's Dog Sees God

Great Jo Anne Glover can only do so much in New Village Arts’ production of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke

North Coast Rep’s Voice of the Prairie underplays its most vital element—us