Elden Street Players Red
By Bob Ashby • Jun 10th, 2013 • Category: ReviewsAs Rothko says at the beginning and near the end of the play, “What do you see?” To anyone interested in cracking good theater, Elden Street’s production is art worth seeing.
As Rothko says at the beginning and near the end of the play, “What do you see?” To anyone interested in cracking good theater, Elden Street’s production is art worth seeing.
Laurel Mills Playhouse’s exuberant production vividly conveys the passion and confusion of young people trying to cope with the exhilaration and anxiety of an unusually turbulent and difficult time.
Constellation’s Gilgamesh provides a colorful and active presentation of the outline of this hero’s journey that is well worth watching.
Other Desert Cities is a good, rather than a great, script, and the success of a production rests largely with the quality of the acting. Arena’s production scores high in this respect.
Every aspect of LTA’s 33 Variations — acting, music, technical theater — exceeded even the high expectations an audience has for the work of a top-tier community theater company.
Castaways deserves credit for taking on a show that can be quite challenging for a group with limited resources, and the cast and staff clearly exerted substantial effort in putting the production together.
Big River at the Greenbelt Arts Center is a good illustration of the proposition that community theater can be very good theater, and that an intelligently conceived community production that its participants care about can have a quality result.
The play is not a military history lesson; as Dead Wallenstein says to begin the show, “Forget the 30 Years’ War.” The conflict that matters is in the minds of the characters.
While full of strong acting and good technical theater, the production gives the audience ample opportunity to think about issues that continue to trouble modern societies.
As someone who lived through the great days of the Civil Rights Movement, and the inspiration that Martin Luther King and others, warts and all, provided to the nation, I find it impossible not to be moved by the material of this play, warts and all.