Giant's narrative unfolds during a fraught lunch in 1983, where Roald Dahl faces his Jewish publisher and others regarding his controversial remarks about Israel, leading to a battle over apology versus defiance.
The sisters gather to remember their late father, but the jesa is intended to honor both parents, creating a complex emotional landscape. Grace's home is immaculate, yet the sisters' grief disrupts the intended smoothness of the ritual.
From Hitchcockian stylish suspense and audacious comedy to deeply personal storytelling, infused with magic, and a big-hearted laugh-out-loud world premiere musical this season invites audiences into conversations that are urgent, hilarious, and profoundly human.
Playwright Mikki Gillette—described once as 'the Joan of Arc of the trans community in Portland theatre' by actor and critic Bobby Burmea—sets the work in the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot. We're dropped into the lives of four trans people practically begging the world to care about their pain, but with very different ways of approaching a brighter future.
Clocks, like live animals, are dangerous things to put onstage, because they so easily draw your eye away from the performers. In Jacob Perkins's The Dinosaurs, for instance, I caught myself glancing up at the circular plastic one at the left of the stage, frozen at about 15 minutes past the hour. The immobile hands are surely a design choice, one that layers a sense of unreality over the otherwise hyperreal rec room (designed by the nearly ubiquitous firm dots) where The Dinosaurs's characters gather.
There's a refrain that follows Sean Hayes around in The Unknown, and it doesn't take much to hear echoes of The Phantom of the Opera in the way the playwright David Cale has arranged its scansion and melody. "I wish you'd wanted me," Hayes's character, Elliott, a playwright who's on a digital-detox retreat upstate, hears a mysterious voice singing somewhere outside his window.
(For many Americans, it's also Presidents Day Weekend, a federal holiday on Monday, plural to honor George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In Florida, the governor in January sidelined Lincoln and officially declared it Washington's Birthday Weekend, part of what Secretary of State Cord Byrd called a movement "to teach the next generation about the principles our Founding Fathers enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution." To quote the great Teddy Riley: "No diggity.")
Tiger Style! - Profile Theater's first full production in a two-year dive into the work of playwright Mike Lew - is a canny choice, well-designed to whet audience members' appetite for Lew's work and keep them watching for the next offerings in a planned cycle. The play's quick comic timing deftly navigates themes that might otherwise encounter resistance, leaving those who are willing with lots to chew on.
David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly is a captivating drama that subverts Puccini's Madame Butterfly through the true story of a French diplomat's 20-year affair with a Chinese opera singer. As cultural and personal identities blur, the play challenges our assumptions about love, power, and deception. With its clever twists and poignant humor, M. Butterfly is a thought-provoking exploration of desire, illusion, and the complexities of human connection. Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Happy snow day, DC! Have a snowball fight, indulge in frosty food deals, and then venture out to the theater. There are several new performances opening this week, such as Chez Joey and world premieres from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Plus, Ramy Youssef arrives at Warner Theatre to tell his hilarious clean jokes. Best Things to Do This Week and Weekend January 26-February 1
When a stranger smiles at you, you smile back. That is why, when Sir Ian McKellen ( The Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Amadeus) walked on the stage in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and smiled at me, I smiled back. It was the polite thing to do. It was also completely unnecessary, because McKellen was not actually on the stage in front of me. He smiled at me through a pair of special glasses.
The Specimen follows Johnny, a gay paleozoologist who loses his job amid Trump-era science budget cuts. Outraged and unmoored, Johnny refuses to abandon his life's work, continuing his research through increasingly dangerous-and darkly comedic-methods inside his apartment bathroom. Blending horror, satire, and political rage, The Specimen explores queer identity, institutional abandonment, and the costs of pursuing truth in a world that no longer funds it.
The sad part of theater, says Illya deTorres of Chapel Theatre Company in Milwaukie, is that the experience evaporates. "It's like being in summer camp," he says. "It just goes by in a blur."
When Marjorie Prime premiered a decade ago, its technology felt abstract and futuristic. Today, it feels incremental. Artificial intelligence is no longer a novelty; it is fluent, responsive, and embedded in daily life. What once played as a cautionary what if now lands as a question of habit: not whether we would use such technology, but why we already do.
The Lawrence Hall of Science's planetarium is playing Traditions of the Winter Sun, a short film about Ohlone and other cultures' traditions surrounding the cosmos, from now to Feb. 27. Photo credit: Lawrence Hall of Science Learn about Ohlone and other cultural traditions for the sun, moon, planets and stars in the 30-minute planetarium show, Traditions in the Winter Sky. Show runs from now to Feb. 27 at the Lawrence Hall of Science. $5 plus admission fee
Going into the woods can evoke scary thoughts of wild animals and creepy people, but not so for the magical forest displayed in SF Playhouse's stunning production of Into the Woods. Beautifully designed by Heather Kenyon, these woods feature lush trees and foliage with one tall tree rotating to become Rapunzel's tower. Bill English cleverly directs his impressive cast with just the right amount of sarcasm, humor and tender moments. His slightly over-the-top look at storybook characters gone awry
Bless me, reader, for I have sinned. For 40 years Moses wandered in the wilderness. And for roughly the same amount of time I have stumbled through the landmines of contemporary culture, wearing the sackcloth of the most extreme form of penitent journalist. I have been a critic. Well, apparently I have. That's what everyone tells me. Lord knows I've denied it over the years.
When their (perfect) adaptation was well past its twentieth birthday, director Brian Henson looked back on what had originally been envisioned as a "romping parody": "Then we stopped and reconsidered," he said. The screenwriter Jerry Juhl put it this way: "Rather than let the Muppets ride roughshod over Dickens, I went back to the novel and decided it would be rotten of us to belittle the quality of one of the greatest stories of all time."
