Watch and learn: Playback Theatre creates community healing

“Let’s watch.” These words commence the evening’s performance at Playback Theatre. Actors come forward, improvising as they go to illustrate a story. Audience members will likely resonate with the unfolding tale because it is, after all, their story. Within this theatrical environment, actors and audience participate in a night of theater and storytelling that can […]

La Reina: A dream-like world

La Reina doesn’t have a genre to contain it. The show features a collage of ancient texts and travels from Antiquity, the Golden, Classical and Dark Ages, to the Medieval and Reformation period. Using shadow puppetry, brightly-illuminated backdrops, stunning costumes, movement-theater and a live electronic soundscape, the production takes on a dream-like quality. It is as if a wild, somewhat surreal vision is playing out before the audience, and its tempo is slow and unhurried.

She said, She said: Asheville Community Theatre’s Steel Magnolias

Dramady “Steel Magnolias” was first staged in ’87. The story, about a group of women in Natchitoches, La., was written by playwright Robert Harling around the death of his sister. The local production at Asheville Community Theatre is directed by Michael Lilly and runs through Sunday, Aug. 18. Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m.. Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Mother-daughter reviewers Becky Upham and Cicely Upham discuss.

She Said, She Said: Asheville Community Theatre’s Kiss Me Kate

“Kiss Me Kate” runs on Friday and Saturday evenings with a Sunday matinee through June 30th.  This Cole Porter musical opened on Broadway in 1948 and it earned the Tony for Best Musical.  The story within a story weaves together a musical production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with the on and off-stage relationship between Fred Graham, (played by John C. Hall) the show’s director, producer, and star, and his leading lady, his ex-wife Lilli Vanessi (played by Wendy Morrison.) Mother-daughter reviewers Becky Upham and Cicely Upham discuss the local production.