‘Frankenstein’ redux Review of Young Frankenstein at the Kennedy Center Opera House The funniest scene in “Young Frankenstein,” the Mel Brooks musical adapted from his 1974 film, now onstage at the Kennedy Center, occurs toward the end. The show’s eponymous doctor leads his monstrous creation in a tap-dancing routine. Performing a duet of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,”...
Battlefields of the Heart Reviews of 5 plays at the 2009 Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia Farragut North ★★★½ Stephen Bellamy, the protagonist in Beau Willimon’s “Farragut North” — onstage at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va. — could be any of the young denizens who joined Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and have since...
Indictment of matrimony at odds with gay marriage Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” — now in revival by the Shakespeare Theatre Company — shocked audiences when it premiered on Broadway in 1933. It’s not hard to see why. The play, about a polyandrous relationship between two men and a woman, makes no apologies for its liberationist view of sex and relationships and could...