Voyeur Gives Peek Into The Mormon Moment

Director, Cynthia Flemming, who is also the show’s choreographer, has assembled quite an impressive cast and crew and working together they put on one H-E-double-hockey-sticks of a show. The high level of energy, sustained throughout the three act musical parody, started the moment the first players stepped out onto the stage singing Our World and was still alive and kicking in the finale, Be Free. Continue reading

The Lesson of The Scarlet Letter

As you walk into the Studio Theater at the Rose Wagner Center for the Performing Arts, as with any play done in a studio space, you expect to see the set subtly lit with the stage lights, but you expect it to be vacant with the actors hiding backstage or in the wings waiting for the show to start. That’s not the case with Plan-B’s THE SCARLET LETTER, by Jenifer Nii (Adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne). Yes, you see the set, subtly lit by the stage lights, but it’s not empty. Hester Prynne, played by Lauren Noll, stands defiantly at the top of the scaffold holding her baby bundled in a black cloth. Occasionally the baby cried or otherwise fussed, and she would attend to it. I heard one audience member say, “oh! She’s real” when Hester moved. Continue reading

A Comedy of Shakespearean Proportions

What do you get when you take selections and characters from the works of William Shakepeare, 8 talented actors, the events of recent years (which, honestly, were fairly Shakespearean when you think about it), and a theatre company whose mission is to create unique and socially conscious theatre? You get Plan-B’s Lady Macbeth. Continue reading

Gypsy Bares All

Presenting a musical like Gypsy is no mean feat. Its subject matter is difficult (a mother who drives her two children to stardom, eventually driving one away from her and another into a career as a burlesque stripper). It’s been through four Broadway revivals. It’s been made into a film twice. It’s starred stage greats like Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, and Ethel Merman. It’s been touted as musical theatre’s answer to Shakespeare’s King Lear.

No pressure. Continue reading

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