I saw As You Like It at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre over the weekend, and it was fine. A nice little show, most everybody did a good job, and what do you expect from As You Like It? Frankly, I’m beginning to suspect that Shakespeare just wasn’t really a top-notch comedian. But anyway, there’s a [...]
Archive for the ‘Criticism’ Category
On Shakespeare, and As You Like It
Posted: April 25, 2011 in braak, CriticismTags: as you like it, braak, shakespeare, theater, theatre
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Untitled Theater Company 61′s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Posted: December 6, 2010 in braak, CriticismTags: blade runner, braak, do androids dream of electric sheep, philip k. dick, reviews
My review at io9.com: Adapting Dick’s seminal novel is guaranteed to be a difficult process, and would have been even if Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner weren’t already a 30-year-old SF classic. Untitled Theater Company #61 took on the ambitious challenge. And mostly, it worked. I think that “mostly it worked” was actually an edit; the [...]
I put this up for about ten seconds last time, then I took it down and sold it to someone. Now, I am linking to it instead! My original title: Naturalism–A Bad Form of Theater? Or the Worst Form of Theater? was not approved.
Verisimilitude Again
Posted: October 21, 2010 in braak, CriticismTags: Paranormal activity, verisimilitude
Cross-posted from Threat Quality: Jesus, when am I going to stop with this? Okay, so, Holland wrote his bit about Paranormal Activity, and he’s right in a lot of important ways. But I think there’s actually even more to be mined from a discussion of the subject, and since that’s basically all I do (talk about [...]
Cards on the table here: I’ve been wanting to do an expressionist version of Dracula for some time now. I have all kinds of crazy ideas for it, and to that end I have done some investigations into the aesthetics of horror, and looked at some of the ways that horror works onstage. I am [...]
I saw a local theater’s production of Mel Brooks’ musical The Producers a few weeks ago. Entirely by coincidence, I happened to be there during the talk-back session. Now, I’ve participated in talk-back sessions before, so I should have known better than to ask serious questions; most of the time, a talk-back is just another [...]
The Witch of Edmonton: On the Merits of Preserving Jacobean Dramas
Posted: June 14, 2010 in CriticismTags: the witch of edmonton, theatre
(cross-posted at Threat Quality Press) Just saw REV Theater Company’s The Witch of Edmonton over the weekend; I’m not going to say much about the quality of the production, as the play isn’t running anymore, so who cares? It wasn’t the best design, direction, or acting that I’ve ever seen, but I doubt that, even [...]
