Kevin Horrigan wrote a column in today’s (1/29/12) St. Louis Post-Dispatch regarding the Captain of the sunken cruise ship who abandoned his post long before all the passengers had escaped and been accounted for.

There is much to admire in Esther's character, the focus of Lynn Nottage's engaging play Intimate Apparel.  She is unflinchingly honest, kind, soft-spoken, humble and hard-working. 

The first Dance St. Louis program of the year was a stunner.

Winter Opera’s ambitious production of Strauss’s seriocomic “Ariadne auf Naxos” is impressive, given the size of the cast and intellectual complexity of the piece.

In "Oleanna", playwright David Mamet takes on a lot of issues: the state of academia, the pitfalls of bleeding heart liberals, the inequality of the sexes, the perils of communication breakdown, and perhaps most importantly the power of personal perception.

The year was 1964.  The place?  St. Nicholas, a Catholic church and school in the Bronx.  The Doubt?  Did Father Flynn molest one of his students, particularly the first African American student at the school?  The answer leaves us in doubt.

I am an Agatha Christie "newbie." I have never read one book, nor seen any staged production written by the mystery author. I was not familiar with the quick-witted, dust-loathing detective, M. Hercule Poirot, who has appeared in more than 30 of Christie's novels and short stories. The sleuth also appears in Black Coffee, Christie's first and only mystery that was originally written as a play.

An apt tribute to the Fab Four at the Fox.

The Rep’s production of Keith Huff’s drama “A Steady Rain” is a classic example of a less than satisfying script turned into compelling theatre by outstanding acting and direction.

I’ve never seen the musical Avenue Q before, nor read a review. Having seen it now, however, as performed by the [Insert Name Here] theatre company, I can just imagine some of the witty phrases that might, in the past, have been used in reviews, based on its life-size puppets and obvious ties to Sesame Street and Jim Henson’s Muppets. I would guess its themes of racism (“Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”), sexual preference (“If You Were Gay”), on-stage puppet, um, physical encounters (“You Can be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You’re Makin’ Love)”), online porn (“The Internet is for Porn”), and females of questionable morals, among others, would no doubt have engendered a load of double-entendres and naughty plays on words. My timid contribution is the title of this review.

Metro Theater Company productions almost always have an exciting theatricality about them, like the current Battledrum, which is playing at the Missouri History Museum in concert with their Civil War exhibition. Battledrum opens with Union soldiers hurling firebrands at a Confederate homestead in Kentucky in 1863. Director Carol North gives us quick images of men racing about, leaping over a split-rail fence placed cunningly by set designer Nicholas Kryah, while John Armstrong's lights and Rusty Wandall's sound give us flames and explosions. It happens fast – just long enough to pull us into the story, short enough that we don't have time to ponder that we're watching lights flash and hearing loud sounds, not someone's home and barns being destroyed.

First Run Theatre’s An Evening of Mysteries consists of two long 1-act plays by local playwright Richard LaViolette:  Divine’s Grace and The Kerpash Affair - each as sweet and innocent as crime and skullduggery can be.

Tessitura: Watch out for flying children at the City Museum!

First, a disclaimer: I saw The Black Rep's On Golden Pond at the final preview, the night before the official opening. I'd rather not review a preview. Though open to the public, previews do not represent the final product. That's why they're called previews.

The West End Players Guild tag line is “big theatre in a small space”. They are true to their word with this excellent production of The Seafarer - a powerful, darkly funny journey into the language-rich world of Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s native Dublin.

See How They Run is a comedic English farce of mistaken identities set in the late 1940s. The play written by Philip King takes place at the Vicarage where the vicar, Reverend Lionel Toop (Grant Neimeyer) lives peacefully with his former American actress wife Penelope (Amanda Vick), and is taken care of by their maid Ida (NoreenAnn Moore).

Impression, illusion, and yes, some confusion abounds in this lavish musical but, hey, it's Sondheim and he seldom lets us off easy.

Tuesday night a few thousand Iowa Republicans watched passengers in the GOP clown car argue over who hated gays and lesbians the most. Around the same time, a few thousand St. Louis theatregoers watched a splendid performance of one of the most gay friendly Broadway musicals in living memory, “La Cage Aux Folles”.