Aaron Kopec's horror stories at the Alchemist Theatre have collected quite a rogues' gallery over the years. Past villains have included Dracula, Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes. This fall, Kopec delves into less familiar...

  Quite often, promo pics for upcoming shows give me something to post into a blog . . . and they look really nice next to a print review, but occasionally there are some that go beyond that and they end up hanging out on my desktop for a bit longer than usual . . . lately there have been quite a few of these . . . here's a look at some of my favorites . . .      Fools For Tragedy have had a...

    After great adventure, the hero leaves his wife for the daughter of a king. I don't care what the extenuating circumstances were, it was an epically heartless move . . . a move immortalized in Euripides' Medea. The play gets a modern staging this month as Fools For Tragedy brings the story to life at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum. Judging from advanced word on the production, it...

Intro Being a theatre critic who attends 100+ shows per year, my year is defined a bit differently than a standard calendar will allow for. My year starts in August with the first shows of the new theatre season,  continues through May as regular season switches gears for the summer shows and finally ends in July as the new theatre season gets underway the following month . . . and so each ye...

Intro Being a theatre critic who attends 100+ annually, my year is defined a bit differently than a standard calendar will allow for. My year starts in August with the first shows of the new theatre season,  continues through May as regular season switches gears for the summer shows and finally ends in July as the new theatre season gets underway the following month . . . and so each year I l...

    Honestly, ancient Greek myth never really appealed to me as a kid. I was a lot more interested in Nordic legend . . . which probably had a lot more to do with the mid-'80's work of artist/writer Walt Simonson than anything else . . . but then reading about Snorri Sturlson and some of the original legends, they resonated with me a lot more than stories of Zeus and Hercules and Hera and so on...

Fools for Tragedy's current staging of Jordan Gwiazdowski's Waiting, a deconstruction of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, plays like an existential funhouse, with metaphorical mirrors strewn everywhere...

99% of life is the fine print—all those little details. (This past evening, I was waiting fro my wife to get back from acupuncture and my baby daughter had scraped her chin--she caused herself real pain for one of the first times ever. She cried so much and why is it that the little plush wee ninja is so much better at making her happy than I am? And precisely how am I going to tackle things t...

Fools For Tragedy takes the stage of the Alchemist Theatre again next month as it presents Jordan Gwiazdowski’s Waiting. Conceptually, it’s a rather clever mutation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. A group of five actors play various roles whil waiting around to perform in a production of Waiting For Godot. Two actors have received anonymous contracts to appear in the show. They wai...