items tagged with Tristan Layne Tapscott

David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross is arguably, though not that arguably, the author's best-known, best-loved, and all-around best play. (Thanks to 1992's celebrated film version, I have friends - including friends who don't really like plays - who can quote entire scenes verbatim.) And it's no overstatement to say that the cast recruited for the Curtainbox Theatre Company's presentation of this exhilaratingly profane comedy is ridiculously gifted. At one point here, you'll find Michael Kennedy, Pat Flaherty, Eddie Staver III, Louis Hare, and Daniel D.P. Sheridan all sharing the Village Theatre stage, and that's before David Furness and Tristan Tapscott show up.

As I never tire of telling people, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night ranks first on my list of all-time favorite plays, which puts me in league with, I'd imagine, several thousand others over the years. Widely considered the greatest work ever written by the author widely considered the greatest playwright our country has yet produced, O'Neill's autobiographical epic is nothing less than America's answer to King Lear - an incisive, harrowing, and altogether exhilarating study of family conducted with a microscope and a scalpel.

This past Thursday, the Harrison Hilltop Theatre celebrated not only the debut of its latest stage offering - the Jonathan Larson musical tick ... tick ... BOOM! - but the first anniversary of the venue's opening. And both were celebrated in style, with pre-performance hors d'oeuvres, beer samples from the Great River Brewery, an unveiling of the new Harrison Hilltop logo, and the announcement of the company's 2009-10 season.

The Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's current family musical, Pinkalicious, is as lightweight and sweet as cotton candy, and about as nourishing; it gives you a friendly sugar rush and all but evaporates on contact. Yet hidden within the show's pleasant, amiable presentation are moments of delightfully loopy comic invention, and throwaway bits so surprising and bubbly and odd that the production lingers in your head far longer than you'd expect it to. It's cotton candy, all right, but it's cotton candy filled with Pop Rocks.

By the time the title character takes to the skies in the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's Peter Pan, the effect, while wondrous, is also somewhat superfluous, since the presentation had already been airborne for a good 40 minutes beforehand, and will continue to be for the two hours that follow. If ever a production deserved to be called "ethereal," it's this one, but even that adjective doesn't suggest just how enthralling this Peter Pan truly is.