MARK BLANKENSHIP

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What if you took everything in our culture that was indebted to Cinderella and put it on a single stage? Just think of all the songs, ballets, fancy shoes, and enchanted mice you’d have to account for. In one sense, you’d be confronted with aesthetic chaos, but in another, you’d experience a carnival of genres that cohered into a familiar story.

It helps, of course, that the play is so stimulating. The first act takes place in colonial Africa in the 19th century, where Martin, a British administrator, lives with his family and tries his best to uphold his country’s ideals. These include the presumed superiority of straight, white men, and that perception is ingrained so strongly that Betty (Martin’s wife) is played by a male actor in drag

What strikes you most about the set? The brightly colored paper everywhere, like a gift bag just exploded? The rickety old piano in the back, like Miss Kitty is going to saunter out of her saloon and sing you a tune?

Meet Fight or Flight Theater , where the most powerful moments may be on a trapeze. This video features company members John Behlmann, Eileen Little, Daniel Loeser, and Richard Thieriot.

It’s a moment that would be complicated in any musical: In the current Broadway revival of Spring Awakening, at the start of a song in the second act, a group of actors faces upstage, backs to the audience. They represent a forest of trees, and eventually they begin to sway in unison as the show […]

Why Max Posner’s play Judy is really about the present day — Let’s forget for a moment that Judy is set in the year 2040. First and foremost, the show, which is now at the New Ohio in a production from Page 73, is about three adult siblings who are learning to break their longtime […]

NEW MUSICALS

Why Lucas Hnath wants everyone in The Christians on a mic