Lovell Estell III

Nearly three decades ago, this reviewer attended a production of The Nutcracker with his daughter, and was surprised how thoroughly enjoyable this "children's show" was. Similarly, while It's a Musical World reveals no surprises, the production at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater is a kick from start to finish, and......

Playwright Avery Crozier and director Tom Beyer return to Theater of NOTE for more laughs with their raucous satire, which takes a flamethrower to social proprieties, workplace decorum and some sacred PC cows. The format hasn't changed since it was performed in 2010: The audience determines which role the seven......

Issues of science, medical ethics and criminal law propel Art Shulman and Robert Begam's provocative courtroom drama. Director Rick Walters has transformed this small venue into a courtroom interior surrounded by audience members, some of whom render a verdict at play's end. The site-specific setting is used to good effect....

Henry Ong's drama Sweet Karma is inspired by the life and tragic death of Haing S. Ngor, the Cambodian-American doctor and author who won an Academy Award in 1985 for his portrayal of journalist Dith Pran in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, which chronicled the barbarous regime of the......

More than most of his contemporaries, Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco had a devilishly bleak and irresistibly engaging sense of humor to his vision about the absurdity of the world and human existence. It's clearly on display in Ionescopade, the vaudeville-style musical based on his plays (The Bald Soprano, Exit The......

"I expel all the semen which I have received. I transform the milk of my breasts into deadly poison." Lifted from Heiner Muller's eternally confounding Hamletmachine, the words are a fitting part of the opening tableau of Polish playwright Magda Romanska's similarly themed postmodernist drama, now in its world premiere......

With this spirited production of Jacobean playwright John Ford's 1629 family tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, director Miranda Stewart shows that less is indeed sometimes better. At the play's center is the incestuous relationship between siblings Giovanni (Jonny Rodgers) and Annabella (Hannah Skye Wenzel), whose forbidden love, like that......

The title Cops and Friends of Cops references the raucous "cops only" night held monthly at the tumbledown St. Louis bar in Ron Klier's suspenseful drama. While Dom (Paul Vincent O'Connor) prepares the bar for the night's guests, he is joined by the shabby-looking Paul (Johnny Clark), who insists on......

During the mid 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project, at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt, undertook an extensive gathering of oral histories from former slaves about their lives. It is these voices from an ugly past that are the material for James de Jongh's stirring 1977 docudrama Do Lord Remember......

To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, this is one clown you should send in, for a good time and some soul-healing laughter. Aziz Gual has been working his magic for decades, graduating from Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Clown College and working with "the greatest show on earth," as well as traveling......