by Jeffrey Mindock Make sure to put American Idiot at Pit and Balcony Theatre on your calendar because it is not to be missed. The entire ensemble responsible for this risk-taking endeavor deserves your support based on its execution and cultural merit. American Idiot is a visceral jukebox musical that utilizes its source material in the same vein as The Who’s Tommy. For those of you who may or may not know Green Day’s seminal 2005 Best Rock Album, it’s […]
by Thomas F. Cole “I don’t care if you don’t care!” A poignant lyric echoed by each of the three main protagonists in the current production of alternative punk rock group Green Day’s American Idiot currently running at Saginaw’s Pit and Balcony Theatre and which opened on Friday, May 11. Teenage angst? American Idiot takes you way beyond it. We’re talking about post-teenage angst, here! Set in the recent past of American suburbia (cynically called Jingletown), American Idiot is a […]
by Laura Bigham Moon Over Buffalo is a funny and extremely physical play. The author, Ken Ludwig, is a truly gifted farcical comedy writer. Farce often has several storylines that involve real people stuck in extreme situations and propelled by panic…and that panic creates a lot of laughs. The story follows a touring theatre troupe in 1953 run by, and starring, the Hay family, including: fading stars George and Charlotte Hay, their daughter Rosalinde, and their deaf mother-in-law. The family […]
by Dr. L. Todd Thomas The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett is the stage adaptation of The Diary of a Young Girl, a book compiled from three volumes of diary entries written by Anne Frank while she and her family were hiding for two years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Her father published these as a book in 1947, it was reprinted in English in 1952, and first presented as a stage play […]
by Thomas F. Cole “Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”—Anne Frank, 6 June, 1944. Eight people in hiding for their very lives, and one of them has become the face of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe and Hitler’s Final Solution during WWII. That face belongs to Anne Frank, who is convincingly played by Saginaw native and the current Miss Bay County, Jaeleen Davis, in Pit […]