Toby Zinman has been reviewing theater for The Inquirer since January 2006; she's the Philadelpha reviewer for Variety and a frequent contributor to American Theatre magazine.
Her “day job” is professor of English at the University of the Arts, where she was awarded the prize for distinguished teaching. As an academic, she has published widely and lectured internationally on contemporary American drama.
A Fulbright professor in theater at Tel Aviv University, she also has received five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been invited to be a visiting lecturer in China. Her third book, on Edward Albee’s plays, is set for 2008 publication by the University of Michigan Press.
Her third career, as an adventure travel writer, has taken her all over the world.
Smug, horny, privileged, self-important, football-obsessed frat boys. Unlike the cloying Dead Poets Society or the brilliant History Boys, The Eclectic Society is a play without adult characters, and after a couple of hours, a stageful of pre-civil rights, postadolescent college students, all making speeches at each other, can, and does, wear thin.
Vince the Prince. Vincent Fumo, the disgraced and currently imprisoned state senator, is the central character of The Prince, a new play at the Walnut Independence Studio, though here he's called the Duke. It's a shame they couldn't get Fumo out of jail for the premiere: It would surely count as time served. Maybe even cruel and unusual punishment.
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Gregory Burke's fierce and funny play sneaks up on you. At first, Gagarin Way seems to belong to another place (Scotland), another time (the past), and another set of concerns (the economic class struggle between communism and capitalism). But little by l
- Pig Iron play skitters back with odd new charms.'We put the human condition onstage and make it dance." True to the narrator's word, Pig Iron does just that in Chekhov Lizardbrain, the theater company's most successful brainchild. The show, under Dan Rothenberg's direction, briefly returns to Philadelphia, where it began, trailing clouds of glory from its New York run.
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Conventional wisdom has it that in the 17th century, Moliere raised French comedy for the first time to the level of French tragedy. Forget conventional wisdom. This contemporary version of Moliere's classic, Scapin, is the Lantern Theater's hilarious holiday frolic; it was adapted by Mark O'Donnell and the great clown Bill Irwin, and then Aaron Cromie, our town's brilliant puppetmeister, tweaked their adaptation further. The result is irresistible.
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Well, who's next? After the revered priests and idolized athletes and admired politicians are all buried in sex scandals, is there anyone who rises above the muck, raked or un-?
- The first two "Tuna" holiday shows were terrific. This one is a dud.Tuna, Texas, is the locale of a trilogy of plays from a trilogy of writers: Joe Sears, Jaston Williams, and Ed Howard. Opening the Walnut's Independence Studio season for the third year with a "Tuna" holiday show, this latest entry, Red, White and Tuna, following two hilarious hits, is a definite miss.
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White Christmas, making a two-week stop at the Academy of Music during its national tour - four years and counting - is more holiday event than actual theater. Cobbled together from the 1954 movie that starred Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, with extra songs and a book by David Ives and Paul Blake, this show is about as genuine, and as exciting, as the soapsuds snow that showers down on the audience during the finale.
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Academy of Music, Broad and Locust. Through Dec. 6. Tickets $28-100. Information: 215-731-3333 or www.kimmelcenter.org/broadway
- "The :nv:s:ble Play" is punctuated with humor, though long and repetitive.The :nv:s:ble Play is a diacritically witty title: Whenever Colin, one of the heroes in Alex Dremann's play, dispatches an e-mail, the "sender" field appears merely as the punctuation mark ":" (colon) - which has a slightly different pronunciation.
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Playing at: Philadelphia Theatre Workshop at Studio 5 at the Walnut Street Theatre, Ninth and Walnut Streets. Through Sunday, Dec. 13.
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'Reader, I married him." Is there a fantasy dearer to the female heart than Charlotte Brontë's long-suffering governess finally marrying the lord of the manor?
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