Theatre Preview: Available Light Summons Unabashed Empathy in Columbus Premiere of ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’
October 18, 2019 12:00 pm
Richard Sanford
Cheryl Strayed cuts a deep and personal swath through the American moment in her novels and memoirs. Her time as an advice columnist for The Rumpus stood as both an outlier and an apotheosis, turning her hard-won life lessons into the sharp caring her readers needed. Playwright Nia Vardalos – best known for My Big […]
Review: A Messy, Rewarding Task of Living in ‘Remain in Light’
May 10, 2019 9:41 am Richard Sanford
Available Light end their roller coaster of a 2018-2019 season with Remain in Light, written and directed by executive director Matt Slaybaugh. This kaleidoscopic, physical collage tackles some of the biggest questions facing us today: how do we find meaning? What makes us happy? How do we get out of bed and try to make […]
Review: CATCO’s Funny and Heartfelt ‘Life Sucks’
April 2, 2019 11:00 am Richard Sanford
CATCO’s crowd-pleasing and laugh-filled production of Aaron Posner’s Life Sucks, directed by Steven C. Anderson, returns the greatest rewards if the audience ignores the “Adapted (Sort of) from Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya” credit. Someone who loves Uncle Vanya as much as I do spent much of the first act looking for deeper connections and shared […]
Review: Available Light’s Barbed and Moving ‘This’
March 29, 2019 5:00 pm Richard Sanford
Available Light score another home run with their crackling production of This, the Off-Broadway comedy by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Acacia Duncan. This opens with a party game straight out of BF Skinner and never lets up in its relentless picking-apart of human rituals and contemporary ennui. Merrell (Shanelle Marie) and Tom (Jason Kientz) […]
Theatre Review: CATCO’s Charming ‘Every Brilliant Thing’
January 29, 2019 11:18 am Richard Sanford
Every Brilliant Thing is the one-character piece that introduced playwright Duncan MacMillan (written with original star Jonny Donahoe) to the world stage. A rare, charming play with suicide at its heart, the show’s popularity has not abated since the 2014 premiere. Evidence of that love includes an HBO filmed version of the Off-Broadway run and […]
Theatre Review: Available Light’s Hilarious and Painful ‘Appropriate’
January 19, 2019 4:22 pm Richard Sanford
Happy families have no place on the stage since King Lear and before. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate, opening this weekend in a visceral, hot-blooded production directed by David J. Glover for Available Light, skewers the contemporary model of toxic-family play, sets it on fire, and illuminates ugly truths about the human condition from a fresh, surprising […]
Craig Ferguson’s “Hobo Fabulous Tour”
November 29, 2018 12:00 am
Kylie Harwell-Sturgill
Grammy-nominated, Emmy and Peabody award-winning comedian Craig Ferguson brings his “Hobo Fabulous Tour” to Columbus. These tour performances will be 100% new material and will never be recorded for any form of broadcast or streaming outlet given Mr. Ferguson’s new (ironically) Luddite mistrust of digital technology.
