Friday, April 12,2013

Variations on a theme

by Tom Helma

Friday, April 12 — As we age, and physical deterioration sets in, there are intense urgent moments where we feel a need for answers to unresolved existential questions, to bring completion to important personal goals before we die.

Monday, March 18,2013

Great expectations

Purple Rose's 'Couples' looks at a touchy topic in a touching way

by Tom Helma

“Some Couples May…” the latest social commentary stage play written by Carey Crim, addresses a specific demographic niche — young married couples experiencing the trauma of infertility. Now playing at the Purple Rose Theater, “Couples” takes the audience through the early moments of high expectations that couples have when first embracing the idea of pregnancy and parenthood, then through the heartbreak of hopelessness that ensues when nothing whatsoever happens.

Monday, March 18,2013

Surrealistic sizzler

Hot-blooded 'Salvador Dali' ended the MSU theater season in style

by Tom Helma

The provocative title of “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot” opened a doorway to the most sizzling salsa sexuality on a live stage in a very long time. When was the last time you experienced observing a writhing female cat-woman in heat copulating with a coyote-man three inches away from your left shoe?

Monday, March 18,2013

In the 'Boom'-boom room

A singles ad leads to apocalyptic troubles in a fine MSU Summer Circle Theatre comedy

by Tom Helma

Coming on the heels of what recently turned out to be the pseudo-Rapture, Michiagn State University invites Summer Circle Theatre patrons to imagine a psycho-apocalypse, with the production of “Boom,” Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s send-up of what might happen if the two people left in an underground bomb shelter laboratory to repopulate the world turn out to be cosmically incompatible.

Monday, March 18,2013

From prophecy to reality

Purple Rose's 'White Buffalo' mixes domestic discord with the rhythms of the spirit world

by Tom Helma

Thursday, April 19 — The Purple Rose theater lights dim to a pitch-black dark. There is a moment of silence, followed by the sharp crack of a thunderbolt. Seconds later, strobe-lightning reveals movement: a writhing, convoluted Native-American ghost dance. It is the prophesied white buffalo, struggling to be born, an event that promises the end of wars, the beginning of an extended era of prosperity and peace.

Wednesday, March 13,2013

Stark raving jealous

Shadows and whispers torture ‘Othello’ at Dart Auditorium

by Tom Helma

Tuesday, July 31 — The American Shakespeare Collective brings a slimmed down, fiercely focused adaptation of “Othello” to Lansing Community College that fills the expansive Dart Auditorium stage with a mere six actors playing multiple roles. The troupe serves up a powerful, bare-bones take on the greatest somebody-done-somebody-wrong story in all of drama.

Wednesday, March 13,2013

'Superior' performance

Purple Rose show dissects the American Dream

by Tom Helma

Monday, Oct. 8 — Far from the Miracle Mile, the down-and-out, hole-in-the-wall diner of Purple Rose Theater’s “Superior Donuts” is set in a Chicago ghetto. There is no beginning, no end in this slice-of-life play, yet it brings together an immigrant history, stories of generations past and the complexity of America, not always so beautiful.

Wednesday, March 13,2013

Dark triumph

MSU Opera Theatre’s experimental hybrid packs a powerful punch

by Tom Helma

Tuesday, Oct. 23 — Is it opera or theater? MSU’s production of “Kurt Weill: 2012 But the Days Grow Short … ” is both — the equivalent of two one-act pieces of musical theater joined at the hip. However this is not what you might remember as your grandpapa’s Italianate melodrama.

Wednesday, March 13,2013

Titus Audacious

Violent Shakespearean drama paralyzes and illuminates

by Tom Helma

Monday, Dec. 10 — Plopped in the middle of the holiday heartstring-plucking season, Lansing Community College’s production of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” reminds us that outside the comfort zone of our easy denials, there are still wars going on, innocent people dying and children with not a single parent to wish them a merry Christmas, let alone buy them a cheap toy.

Wednesday, March 13,2013

'Savage'-ly funny

Vaudevillian humor elevates genteel comedy

by Tom Helma

A curiosity, indeed, is Ethel Savage, a wealthy widow who wants to donate her late husband's millions to charity rather than to her three cranky, selfish, ne'er-do-well adult stepchildren. "The Curious Savage" is a perfect fit for the elder madams of the Red Hat Society and the rest of the senior ilk that is Starlight Theatre's target audience.