By Wendy Rosenfield
FOR THE INQUIRER
By Howard Shapiro
I looked both ways three or four times Tuesday afternoon before I crossed Broad Street at Ellsworth, en route to the Rock School for Dance Education.
» More A visit to the Rock School after a young dancer's death
Fela! is in town for just three more days, with the Broadway musical starring either the equally good Sahr Ngaujah or Adesola Osakalumi making an exuberant noise at the Academy of Music for one show on Friday night and two each on Saturday and Sunday.
» More Fela! at the Academy of Music
Bruce Springsteen gave the keynote address at Austin's South by Southwest festival, in which we talks about his career and the history of pop music. It's one of the more endearing things we've ever seen. Bruce starts at about 5:00 in, and he uses some colorful language so be forewarned.
» More Watch Bruce Springsteen's SXSW keynote address
Actress Kim Delaney finally opened up to Entertainment Weekly about her appearance at September's ceremony for the Liberty Medal, an annual award given out by the Constitution Center.
» More Kim Delaney discusses disastrous Liberty Medal speech
View galleryBy Ellen Dunkel
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By Wendy Rosenfield
FOR THE INQUIRER
Despite its backdrop of paved-over western mythology, Sam Shepard's Fool for Love is a rather intimate play for Iron Age Theatre. Though no strangers to Shepard's work -- they've produced The Tooth of Crime, Curse of the Starving Class, and Simpatico -- they're far more likely to take on work about labor issues, racism, or colonialism, and sometimes all at once.
But this, a bitterly comic drama that takes place in a motel room, with a fire-breathing love affair as its engine, is awfully close up for a company that favors the wide angle. With Shepard, the devil's in the details. It's Eddie, lassoing a metal chair and yanking it back with a smirk of juvenile satisfaction, or May, allowing her weary body to yield in Eddie's arms for just one brief, indulgent second before delivering a knee to his tarnished family jewels.
By Wendy Rosenfield
FOR THE INQUIRER
Quintessence Theatre Group's mission is to tangle with the classics, and this time, they tackle Jean Anouilh's wartime adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone. A response to Nazi occupation of France, the tragedy, as reimagined for a 20th-century audience, trades the wrath of the gods for existential dilemma, allowing man and woman to blunder about on their own, making terrible decisions for terrible reasons.
Antigone, you may recall, is the daughter of Oedipus and daughter/granddaughter of Jocasta, both dead. Antigone's uncle Creon claimed Thebes' throne in their wake, and her brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, killed each other on the battlefield. It's a bad scene, and doesn't get any better when Creon declares Polynices a traitor, refuses him a proper burial, and discovers Antigone burying him anyway. Anouilh's Creon is a bureaucrat, Antigone an impulsive kid with big ideas, and both confuse pride with sacrifice.
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