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The key to a good murder mystery, comedy or not, is in the web of misdirection, and the handling of the ultimate reveal in a way that is equally surprising and sensible. The key to a great murder mystery is in crafting a tale that remains entertaining, even when the
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Footloose seems like a natural candidate for adaptation to a stage musical. It has a cheeseball inspirational plot (big-city kid rolls into rural religious town, learns to fit in while teaching them the joy of not banning dancing). The story is centered entirely around the prospect of dance numbers. It
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Mother. Daughter. Killer. Lover. Angel. Demon. Bette Midler. Assemblage Theater's debut presentation pulls away the walls that separate these disparate images, leaving behind the revelation that is Terminus. Mark O'Rowe knows there is darkness in the best of us, and profound decency in the worst. In his Terminus we bear witness
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David Domkowski knows that, quality notwithstanding, there are some shows that the Big Three of Tacoma area community theater companies just can't do. So the longtime Tacoma director made up his own, that can. Mark O'Rowe's Terminus is a play like that. "The moment I read the play I
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The concept of The Color Purple as a stage musical seems to evoke the same reaction in virtually everyone - at least everyone I know. And that reaction is, "Huh?" Alice Walker's Pulitzer-winning novel follows Celie, a young black woman in 1930s Georgia, from a childhood of rape by her father,
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The concept of The Color Purple as a stage musical seems to evoke the same reaction in virtually everyone - at least everyone I know. And that reaction is, "Huh?" Alice Walker's Pulitzer-winning novel follows Celie, a young black woman in 1930s Georgia, from a childhood of rape by her father, into
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How do you cope with a pain most people can't even conceive? How do you mourn the death of your young son? And when you know it was a senseless accident that took his life, and when there's no target for blame, where does your anger go? David Lindsay-Abaire won a
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I've been following the work of Aaron Sorkin since the days of the short-lived TV show Sports Night. I've observed that there are a few things Sorkin clearly loves more than anything else: space travel, talking while walking, stealing his own lines and Philo T. Farnsworth. I've also
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I've been following the work of Aaron Sorkin since the days of the short-lived TV show Sports Night. I've observed that there are a few things Sorkin clearly loves more than anything else: space travel, talking while walking, stealing his own lines and Philo T. Farnsworth. I've also known John Munn
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My wife was thoroughly unexcited about seeing Play It Again, Sam at Lakewood Playhouse. She's insisted for quite some time - or at least any time we look at comedies to rent or talk about seeing Midnight In Paris - that she hates Woody Allen movies. What's more, she'd
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My wife was thoroughly unexcited about seeing Play It Again, Sam at Lakewood Playhouse. She's insisted for quite some time - or at least any time we look at comedies to rent or talk about seeing Midnight In Paris - that she hates Woody Allen movies. What's more, she'd seen
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When writing a review, especially about a play that I enjoyed, I do my best to avoid starting on the negative. But I have to get a problem I have with Tacoma Little Theatre's A Christmas Carol off my chest. I sat through the whole thing, two acts
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When writing a review, especially about a play that I enjoyed, I do my best to avoid starting on the negative. But I have to get a problem I have with Tacoma Little Theatre's A Christmas Carol off my chest. I sat through the whole thing, two acts of it,
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Charles Dickens' Oliver! is why I'm in theater. It's not that I love the play to death or anything, but many moons ago my brother ran follow spot for a children's production of the musical through Tacoma Little Theatre, and my whole family was doomed. So it's always fun to
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Jeffrey Hatcher's stage adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde feels ripe with potential ... Potential that never quite breaks free in the Tacoma Little Theatre staging.Most distinctive (and when re-adapting a long-recognized and oft-staged work like Jekyll & Hyde, it pays to be distinctive)
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All the newfangled technology at PLU's Eastvold Studio Theater serves as an invisible backdrop for the remarkably simple and sparse staging that makes up The Fantasticks. The production took me some time to get into, in part because of my vague but persistent expectation of what the show
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PLU's production of the longest-running musical in New York history, The Fantasticks, was not even remotely what I expected. I honestly couldn't really tell you what I expected, except inasmuch as it was "not that." But let me start elsewhere. I was a student at Pacific Lutheran University. I worked for
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There's only so much talent can do. Talent abounds in Tacoma Musical Playhouse's production of Little Women. Singing talent in particular. But, well, if there were ever a novel that didn't need to be made into a musical, this would be up there on my list. I'm not a Little Women aficionado, but
Stage
There's only so much talent can do. Talent abounds in Tacoma Musical Playhouse's production of Little Women. Singing talent in particular. But, well, if there were ever a novel that didn't need to be made into a musical, this would be up there on my list. I'm not a Little Women aficionado, but
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Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is awfully hard to stage. The novel relies much more on introspection and narrative than dialogue and action, and is thus in many ways the antithesis of a medium that eliminates the internal monologue. Bradbury's adaptation, and the Lakewood Playhouse production, rely much more
