When improv comedy works, it suggests an eruption of ping-pong balls. The players start with something ordinary, and without so much as costumes or props, they wind up rocketing off in all directions. That’s when it works, of course, and the good news about “Whirled News Tonight,” the improv troupe
Read More →On a recent stop at Chicago’s Art Institute, I spent time with the Greco-Roman antiquities. Most bare a picture of some god — or is it an actor, playing a god? Theater, with its masks and props, turns up all over these ancient wares, and such pictures came to mind
Read More →I have a problem — a great problem for any theater critic: I have enjoyed a season of theater, which required no digging to find compliments. If the Des Moines metro has ever delivered a one-two punch as powerful as “True West,” at Tallgrass, and “Our Town,” at Repertory Theater
Read More →“True West” may exist on a map, but Sam Shepard has somewhere scarier in mind. The 1980 play, often called Shepard’s masterpiece, reduces a Los Angeles, Calif., ranch house to the kind of wreckage he perceives across the American West. The place isn’t big enough for the two brothers boxed
Read More →At Ankeny Community Theater, a late rehearsal of the mystery-farce “Death by Chocolate” proved swift, professional and, at times, delightful. Yet I kept wondering whether any company could bloom under the long shadow of Garrison Keillor. Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” regularly features Guy Noir, private detective, bumbling through cases that
Read More →“Aggressive.” That’s the word Tim Wisgerhof uses to describe his set for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The designer imagined a sort of “machine” that was “chewing into the audience,” which is why he skewed the hospital setting to one side so an extension of the stage thrusts out
Read More →Josephine Spada, young but already a veteran of New York musical theater, speaks of her role in “American Idiot” with the cool of a professional. “It’s like being shot out of a cannon!” she says. Indeed Spada bubbles with excitement throughout our interview. Naturally the actress wants to promote her
Read More →Ken-Matt Martin delivers the great freak-out of “Clybourne Park,” late in the brilliant second act, and he does it without a word. Martin, playing “Kevin” in this half of the story, loses it amid negotiations over changes in his neighborhood. That’s the park of the title, which African-Americans like Kevin
Read More →“My Name Is Rachel Corrie” presents, among other things, a good example of what’s so rewarding about Des Moines theater. Its director is David A. VanCleave, who studied theater in Chicago. Back in Iowa, though, he’s found himself at the helm of two wildly different performances, one after the other.
Read More →Michael Mayes looks like he’s about to go nova, across the skies of opera. His next gig is Boston and Verdi. He’ll sing “Rigoletto,” no less. Yet the baritone regards Des Moines as an “artistic home.” In 2010, he says, the Metro Opera gave him his “first big shot” in
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