Konstantine Stanislavski Love art in yourself and not yourself in art.
Harold Clurman The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.
by Geoff Hoff~
What was scandalous in the 60s is slightly less scandalous now. Casual attitudes toward homosexuality, infidelity, corrupt politicians and medical professionals, all presented in the guise of a light-hearted, door-slamming farce, were concepts that were shocking to audiences then. Now they seem almost quaint.
Joe Orton wrote What the Butler Saw, his final play, [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Four Clown is probably the sweatiest play I have ever seen. The four young actors in it expend more energy in an evening than most actors expend in their entire career. It is also almost dystopian in its view of the human condition, contains a lot of buggary and is hysterically funny. [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
bash: latterday plays, now being presented by Coeurage Theatre Company at the Actors Circle Theatre, is a frustrating play. Actually, it is three related plays, all a bit frustrating in their own way, each dealing with Mormons and Mormonism (although the third one only peripherally so), and each echoing tragic Greek myths [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, to horribly misquote one of its own characters, is “a darlin’ play. A darlin’ play.” It is, like much Irish art, a fine and disturbing mixture of comedy and tragedy, of fantasy and reality. It could even be considered a precursor to the very American [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Tennessee Williams loved wounded women and wrote about them often. He often used one-act plays to try out the characters and many of the people in the one-acts ended up in his bigger and more well-known works. The five one-act plays, collected under the title Five by Tenn, now playing at Theatre 68, [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
There’s a little bit of magic going on over at the Ruskin theatre. It’s small magic, gentle, nothing showy, no special effects or anything. It is the magic of a night of making love, or the morning after, the magic of a special brew of tea or piece of pie that can [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Usually, the term “reliving your glory days” refers to men who are approaching or have reached middle age, reliving the triumphs they had as athletes in high school, triumphs they haven’t been able to recreate in a life outside that insular environment. In the musical Glory Days, now playing in it’s West [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
I often avoid seeing evenings of one acts because they tend to be focused on showcasing actors rather than presenting an interesting or compelling night of theatre. Occasionally, a group of plays will be collected that have, when put together, an over riding emotional arc, and the evening can then be compelling, [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
The history of the musical The Cradle Will Rock is more intriguing and exciting than the actual play itself. Indeed, Tim Robbins wrote a book and made a movie about the original production, which was directed by Orson Welles as part of his 1937 Federal Theatre Project season that also included his famous [...]
by Geoff Hoff~
Two warring families in old time Verona. One has a son, rather a rake, the other a beautiful daughter. They meet and fall in love at a party he wasn’t supposed to attend, but the animosity between the families forces them to restrict the rest of their meetings to secret trysts in a [...]
