It has been a long, long time since I’ve left a theater wanting to shout, “Run, don’t walk” to see a new musical. But that’s how I left the Omaha Community Playhouse after falling in love with its production of Once. I’d seen its professional road company which didn’t connect for me in a less […]
Native Gardens is simply a very enjoyable, very accessible play, with a weak happy ending which should only bother viewers hoping for something more darkly realistic. Another way to put it, by contrast with the Will Eno play now running at the Bluebarn, the Omaha Community Playhouse offering by Karen Zacarias is a mainstream commercial […]
I hope you don’t take this the wrong way. I’m reading Will Eno’s script for Wakey, Wakey now playing at the Bluebarn theater and I’m under the influence of his scatterbrained monologue. Or maybe I’m under the influence of Aaron Zavitz, who plays Guy, the Everyman who opens the play lying on the stage floor […]
Do you know what you’re missing if you haven’t planned to see A Raisin in the Sun at the Omaha Community Playhouse? It’s the start of something very big 60 years ago that lives as large and fresh today. It’s the story of an African-American family in Chicago that shares the universal dream of a […]
by Warren Francke The best thing about School of Rock is that the musical gives you so many characters to root for. You get to care about a dozen kids, ages 9 to 12, who not only have the Orpheum rocking but they get the joint jumping. Literally. Someone named JoAnn Hunter is credited with […]
As old Chuck Dickens would have eulogized, it was the best of times and the worst of times. The theater season that ended in the spring of 1994 saw Charles Jones, the dominant force in driving the Omaha Community Playhouse to the top, hospitalized for three months as his health failed. […]
I’d love to have heard the exchanges between director Ablan Roblin and his two leading players, Josh Peyton and Tony Schik, as they rehearsed the Steinbeck classic Of Mice and Men at the Omaha Community Playhouse. On preview night, the results of their collaboration first left me puzzled, then went a long way […]
There didn’t seem to be many millennials in the opening night audience for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in the Crossroads Mall, so a savvy crowd knew what to expect when George and Martha began their abusive games at 2 a.m. after a well-lubricated faculty party. More important, as theater and film-goers learned […]
For the 11th year, it began again with “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club” and wound up with the crowd on its feet, dancing and clapping and singing along with “Come together…right now! Over me!” Half of us had been there before and half were virgins, but Billy McGuigan’s Yesterday and Today—An Interactive Beatles […]
An Act of God at the Blue Barn Theatre is more thought-provoking than funny, but then I’m a believer who found Book of Mormon sophomoric. It’s probably funniest to non-believers who think all believers believe literally every word in the Bible. And (I’m still guessing here) those most literal fundamentalists probably are offended […]
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