Hawthorne Players recently presented a polished and entertaining production of The Marvelous Wonderettes. The Marvelous Wonderettes is a jukebox musical boiled down to the essentials. Its 26 songs are pop hits of the ’50s and ’60s. Most are well crafted and well attuned to the emotional and mental lives and maturity of the teenagers they are meant to appeal to—successfully, in most cases.

George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart were two of the most successful playwrights of the mid-twentieth century American theatre. Together they wrote one of the theatre’s best comedies, The Man Who Came to Dinner. And the Kirkwood Theatre Guild is giving it a worthy production.

Times have changed since the film Pretty Woman became one of the most successful romantic comedies of all time. The story’s soft-edged portrayal of the sex trade is even more problematic today than it was when the film premiered in 1990. If this concern is not a deal-breaker, the stage adaptation, Pretty Woman: The Musical, can be an enjoyable evening of theater in the North American tour now playing at the Fox Theatre.

Robert Fishbone, owner of “On the Wall Productions” took us on a tour of their latest murals.

The cast radiated infectious energy when its members burst onto the stage for Sondheim on Sondheim in the recent staging by the Sargent Conservatory of Theater Arts at Webster University. The sense of a special occasion never left this superb production.

The current production of the play The Desperate Hours by The Theatre Guild of Webster Groves demonstrates that this script about the invasion of the home of a suburban family in Indianapolis by three escaped convicts who hold the family hostage still works.

Fly North is a relatively new company that has impressed me with the few things they have done. The leaders of the company, Bradley Rohlf and Colin Healy, also teach theatre classes, and they like to include their students in their productions. Except for the two producers – Rohlf plays Frog, Healy plays Toad – the cast are all their students. They make their teachers look good.

An excellent staging of a thought-provoking play—The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis—is the inaugural production of a collaboration between Cats Cradle Theatre and the Jefferson Avenue Mission in Fox Park.

Watch how the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis transformed a historic apartment building, a childhood home of Tennessee Williams, into an outside theatre.

Sound mixers are unsung heros of concerts and stage performances. We sit down with Tim Albert to talk about just what that entails.