Review: TROUBLE IN MIND at Kansas City Actors Theatre
by Alan Portner - August 14, 2024
It is funny. It is a slice of life. It is a literal peek behind the curtain. Kansas City Actors Theatre production of Alice Childress’s TROUBLE IN MIND allows audiences a long-delayed opportunity to vision America (and its theatrical community) as it appeared in 1955 from an African American point o...
Review: LA CAGE AUX FOLLES at Music Theater Heritage
by Alan Portner - August 04, 2024
Looking for a little relief from the ongoing political season? If so, I should like to recommend the outrageous, belly-laugh of a show now playing in the Music Theatre Heritage Grand Theater on the fourth floor of Crown Center described by another audience member as “awesome.” It is the self-depreca...
Review: MOULIN ROUGE THE MUSICAL at American Theatre Guild
by Alan Portner - July 26, 2024
MOULIN ROUGE The Musical Is something entirely new to the wave of Juke Box musicals overwhelming the Great White Way. It is big, bold, brassy, and projects an altogether sexy sumptuousness while maintaining a sense of humor about itself. The audience leaves the theater on a massive sugar high, full...
Review: DISNEY'S NEWSIES at New Theatre & Restaurant
by Alan Portner - July 16, 2024
This production of NEWSIES, directed and choreographed by Jerry Jay Cranford and assisted by Christina Burton, features a cast of twenty-two dancers and singers, plus constantly in motion LED backdrops, a bridge flown high off the stage floor, combined with three matching stair/tower units strategic...
Review: BIG TROUBLE AT LITTLE YALTA at Central Standard Theatre
by Alan Portner - July 06, 2024
It is not often an audience gets the chance to participate in the developmental process of making significant art that also qualifies as fun. BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE YALTA by Neal Salvage may be that rare opportunity when parody, satire, and history can come together.
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Review: ANASTASIA THE MUSICAL at Theatre In The Park
by Alan Portner - June 18, 2024
Second show this spring at the Shawnee Mission Park Theatre In The Park, is ANASTASIA, a 2017 fairy tale based on a wished-for result concerning the Russian Grand Duchess Anatasia. This, in turn, was based on an earlier 1997 animated film and an even earlier imagining in a 1956 film.
ANASTASIA the ...
Review: PORGY AND BESS at Music Theater Heritage
by Alan Portner - June 10, 2024
Now playing in the Grand Theater at Crown Center is Music Theater Heritage’s production of Gershwin’s “PORGY AND BESS.” This is an example of MTH going “all in” on a very challenging show and producing an extremely credible final product. ...
Review: THE LEHMAN TRILOGY at Kansas City Actors Theatre
by Alan Portner - May 26, 2024
The Lehman Trilogy studies American Dream Mythology as seen through the eyes of Italian playwright and poet Stefano Massini. The English translation by Ben Power transfigures itself into an absorbing and poignant exercise in stellar storytelling as one might imagine it by three brothers around a met...