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Home - Theater
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Vintage Vaudeville - |
Pretty Things Peepshow will get your
tassels a-twirlin’
by Sarah Wengert
Prep your pin-curls and gather your garters, for the Pretty Things Peepshow, a vintage style traveling act that includes burlesque and sideshow entertainment typical of a bygone Vaudeville era.
Although the website (prettythingsproductions.com) says their “tassels have more miles on them then a ’57 Chevy,” this week’s performance marks PTP’s first in the metro.
“It’s our first time in Omaha and we’re really excited. We’ve had interest in coming there before and we just never were able to fit it into our schedule until now,” sizzling redhead go-go Amy told The Reader via phone from a tour stop in San Francisco. The ensemble is on the road on a two and half month national tour, with 40-some shows.
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Cold Cream - |
No need to get All Shook Up about the earthquaking title of the musical opening this weekend at the Omaha Community Playhouse. But a news item from the Playhouse begins, “All Shook Up is not about Elvis.”
And I was quickly corrected when I asked, “Who plays the Elvis role?” Having seen the show at the Orpheum, I knew it wasn’t a Presley bio. I wondered about the lead role, the guitar-toting biker who blows into town.
The newspaper ads make the distinction this way: “The story is NEW! The music is all ELVIS!” And Sunday’s daily called it “the Elvis jukebox musical.” |
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Hope Springs Eternal - |
Monica Yunus and
Opera Omaha’s Figaro
by David Williams
Monica Yunus speaks and writes fluently in Russian, Italian, German, French and Spanish. She’s also more than passable when ordering goulash in a veritable goulash of Slavic tongues, but it is in the language of hope that the star of Opera Omaha’s The Marriage of Figaro is most conversant.
As the wily and spirited Countess Almavida in Mozart’s zany scandal sheet of an opus, she hopes — there’s that word again — that her husband will cease his philandering ways.
As the co-founding director of Sing for Hope, she takes the idea of dreams for a better tomorrow to higher, nobler levels.
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Booked - |
Poets Matt Mason and Dan Leamen will read at the RNG Gallery (next door to Dixie Quicks restaurant, 1915 Leavenworth St.) Friday, Feb. 26, at 7:30 p.m. Leamen is the all-time winningest poet at the Omaha Healing Arts Poetry Slam, and once placed fifth at the Individual World Poetry Slam Championships. The cover is $5.
Celebrate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s birthday this Saturday at Joslyn Art Museum, 2200 Dodge St. from 10 a.m. to noon. Families are invited to stop by to work with artists Nancy Gillett and Jason Puhl on a poetry mural honoring Longfellow, one of America’s best-loved 19th-century poets. Poetry lovers will assemble to recite a portion of “Paul Revere’s Ride” from The Landlord’s Tale at 11 a.m. Admission is free and is part of the NEA’s Big Read with the Joslyn, Henry Doorly Zoo, Omaha Public Library and the Omaha Children’s Museum. Call 342.3300 for more details. |
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Taxicab Confessions - |
August Wilson cycle
continues to shine at JBT
by Warren Francke
The magic of August Wilson’s writing as performed in the John Beasley Theater finds me struggling to convey the power of Jitney, the 1970s part of his 10-play cycle on the African-American experience.
It’s tempting to just exclaim, “WOW!!!” That avoids dissecting the wonderfully unified whole and resists itemizing its many attributes.
Instead, visit the jitney station, where the phone rings and the waiting drivers answer, “Cab service.” Real lives are lived there in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and a huge measure of Wilson’s magic in the talented hands of director John Beasley and a highly professional cast is how familiar his world seems to those of us who didn’t grow up black but shared the more universal search to make our way. |
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Cold Cream - |
Death of a Salesman isn’t new to Bernie Clark. As a collegian in Kearney, he said, “I played the pesky neighbor boy.”
And he helped his high school and university drama students explore the iconic classic by Arthur Miller. He saw others play Willie Loman, from Lee J. Cobb to Dustin Hoffman, and most recently an all-black cast. But now, more than 40 years after his first encounter with the Lomans, he’s facing the biggest challenge of his stage experience, playing Willie himself, the struggling salesman, at the Omaha Community Playhouse. |
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All That Jazz - |
Broadway’s ‘sure thing’ brings sin, sensationalism to Orpheum
by Warren Francke
You hear a musical beat that’s so distinctively Chicago, and then she sings, “The name on everyone’s lips is gonna be Roxie.”
When Bianca Marroquin first delivered that line on stage eight years ago in Mexico City, she did it in Spanish. She’s since played the ambitious chorine on Broadway and on U.S. tours, but still loves becoming Roxie Hart every night when she tears down the fourth wall and tells the audience, “You wanna know something? I always wanted my name in the papers.” |
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Nightclubbing - |
An Evening with Lucie Arnaz at Holland’s 1200 Club
by David Williams
There was a time, before the advent of over-the-top, glowstick-infested theme parties, when mention of “the club scene” evoked images of legendary venues like the Copacabana, the Latin Quarter and the Stork Club.
The idea of being among celebrities and movie stars, hobnobbing with the swells of Fifth Avenue, was but a pipe dream to most folk, usually a celluloid one that flickered across a screen at the neighborhood movie house. But this Valentine’s Day An Evening with Lucie Arnaz at the 1200 Club promises something of a return to the smoky elegance and sophistication — sans the actual smoke, of course — of a bygone era.
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Cold Cream: Theater News - |
You don’t run into the acting Beasleys, John or Tyrone, that often, but you know they’re getting ready for another play in the August Wilson cycle. Jitney, with that father-son team in the theater bearing dad’s name, is already an exciting prospect.
Then a press release arrives and you read down to the fifth paragraph before seeing that “Tony-nominated actor Anthony Chisholm reprises his role as Fielding.” That’s too weak a verb, “reprise,” for the relationship between Chisholm and roles written by Wilson, whose series of plays about the African-American experience in the 20th century is arguably the greatest achievement by any playwright since Shakespeare. |
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Late-Night Love - |
Shelterbelt sexes it up With Love
by Warren Francke
Maybe the last should have been first. If you add up the nine short plays at 8 p.m. and another half-dozen at 11 p.m., “No Strings Attached” was No. 15 in Shelterbelt with Love 9.
But it seemed to be the first to mention romance. Dan Baye was “Nerdy Man” visiting a virginal prostitute (Laci Neal costumed by Victoria’s Secret or maybe Doctor John’s which ran an ad below the play’s listing).
Nerdy brought flowers, and wanted only romance. The wannabe hooker wanted only sex, which gave her more in common with some of the other plays populated by characters more into sex than love. |
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Sardines! - |
Noises Off is full of
laughs at the BLT
by David Williams
“My, people come and go so quickly here!”
Dorothy’s memorable observation from a certain over-the-rainbow cinema classic could be just as easily applied to Noises Off, the hilariously fast-paced British farce running for one last weekend at the Bellevue Little Theater.
With six doors, a window and four additional passageways for rapid-fire comings and goings, there’s a staggering array of action to track, especially when those doors are so deftly employed in a series of precision-timed entrances and exits that leave the near-miss actors forever in a state of almost-but-never-quite bumping into each other. |
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Gotta Have Faith - |
Brigit Saint Brigit delivers Irish drama
by Warren Francke
Brian Friel’s Faith Healer has challenged such accomplished actors as James Mason, who was panned, and more recently Ralph Fiennes, who was praised. The Brigit Saint Brigit Theatre has Aaron Zavitz in the title role, and director Cathy Kurz says, “I wouldn’t do this play without him.”
Maybe “challenge” isn’t quite strong enough. As Frank Hardy, Zavitz opens the play with a monologue, he closes the Irish drama with a second monologue, and never interacts with the other two players, Mary Beth Adams as Frank’s wife, Grace, and Donald Seaman as Teddy, his cockney manager. |
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Cold Cream - |
Okay, maybe I picked Cheaper by the Dozen from all the plays running last weekend because the Omaha Community Playhouse is just three blocks from my house. Or because basketball great Dean Thompson, a former student of mine, was presiding over its sponsorship by Continuum Worldwide, which put on a big preview-night spread.
The weather was nice enough to drive all the way to Olde Towne for a look at talented Therese Rennels in Bellevue Little Theatre’s nutty Noises Off, but it might have been distracting with Cathy Hirsch playing the character who usually parades around in pink panties. |
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Extra Cream - |
I moved to New Hampshire from Nebraska two years ago and I’m always looking for reminders of my time in the Midwest. So when I found out that a college campus in western Massachusetts was producing a play about Nebraska, I had to check it out.
The play, 1905, examines the experiences of immigrant homesteaders settling the Great Plains a century ago in search of land and a better life. The pioneers struggled to integrate their customs and adapt to new technologies, issues that still challenge today’s immigrants. |
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The Art of Collaboration - |
World-renowned dance group Pilobolus
brings collaborative dance to Omaha
by Jasmine Maharisi
Forty years ago, our country experienced a profound revolution that swung the social pendulum from “I” to “us.” We all know the story: free love and Woodstock, long hair and peace symbols. It was good while it lasted but the world has changed.
Or perhaps it hasn’t changed as much as we think. World-renowned dance company Pilobolus is testament to that. Formed in 1971 in Connecticut, the dance group is proof that the era’s emerging philosophy of unity and collaboration has stood the test of time. And on Saturday night, Omaha will have the opportunity to experience what Amsterdam, London and even the Queen of England have already experienced: the art of collaborative dance. |
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Cold Cream - |
When this space was devoted to the good fortune of theaters that weren’t running on those wicked winter nights, we neglected the fact that all those shows opening last weekend and this weekend were rehearsing on days that demanded an Iditarod determination.
In the case of Cheaper by the Dozen now starting at the Omaha Community Playhouse, director Judith K. Hart was driving from Lincoln, and 10 young people were joining Ron Chvala as the efficiency-expert father and Dawn Buller-Kirke as their mother, with Virginia Kincaid as “the very precise Miss Brill.” (The rest of the dozen are babes sleeping upstairs.) |
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Madame Ovary - |
BroadStreet Theatre tells two-dozen tales of
feminine force
by Warren Francke
When women jump off trains and out of planes, stage a “pee protest” or stand up to anyone from rapists to male chauvinist pigs, That Takes Ovaries, says the title of the latest BroadStreet Theatre production.
Add the subtitle, Bold Women, Brazen Acts, and the bottom line on the postcard which promotes the play by asking, “How Big Are Yours?” If that doesn’t have you boasting, “Elephantine!” you still may buy into another pitch that promises this “ultimate girls’ night out will have you shouting, ‘You go, girl.’” |
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Cold Cream: Theater News - |
Somewhere out in Theaterville, news that Shelterbelt had postponed its Instant Theater weekend until April 2-3 must have inspired a few producers to sigh, “There but for the grace of God and good timing go I.”
Fortunately for Chanticleer’s Barefoot in the Park and BroadStreet’s That Takes Ovaries, openings arrive this weekend, not during the minus-40 wind chills of last week. And the touring cast of Little House on the Prairie missed our bone-chilling blizzard by a few days, but will find us empathetic when the Ingalls family faces winter hardship. |
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Pa’s Prairie - |
Little House makes
big splash into
Omaha this week
by Warren Francke
The Beast married Babette the Feather Duster and now tours as Pa Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie the Musical. But because Ma Ingalls is Melissa Gilbert, famed from playing Laura Ingalls in the television series, you haven’t heard as much about Pa.
That’s despite Steve Blanchard’s 11-year run in Beauty and the Beast, mostly in the title role. “It was a total aberration” after more than a decade of touring, “to be in one show on Broadway for 11 years,” he said.
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Cold Cream: Theater News - |
It’s a long shot, but I’m predicting the Blue Barn will cast Ndamukong Suh in its next show, Hot ‘n’ Throbbing, though his role with the Cornhuskers makes him a better fit for Brigit Saint Brigit’s Faith Healer at the end of January.
Okay, that’s not exactly a prediction. Nor is it forecasting to suggest the new year opens with a contrast between the new and familiar: Chanticleer gives us the familiar Barefoot in the Park and Mary Carrick’s BroadStreet Theatre offers the new That Takes Ovaries: Bold Women, Brazen Acts, where the ladies swing their huevos. |
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