Theater

Fixing Social Insecurities

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Talk about your boardwalk empires: Atlantic City native son Norman Twain has built a business brimming with what some other Hollywood/Broadway producers may consider product as prohibitive as Prohibition: socially relevant films and plays.

Theater

Road Trip with Alfred Uhry

Playwright's 'Driving Miss Daisy' a GPS of the heart

By:

Michael Elkin

Silver flasks seem appropriate accoutrements for those sipping a taste of the southern comfort that is "Driving Miss Daisy" as it approaches its silver anniversary. The South will rise again -- but for the first time on Broadway -- with playwright Alfred Uhry once again in the driver's seat. This time -- 22 years after taking home the Pulitzer Prize...

Theater

'Tis the Seasons

Peek at Valli: Writer Marshall Brickman arrives in Philly as a big man in town

By:

Michael Elkin

Walk like a mensch? Marshall Brickman has the steps down pat. Brazilian-born Brickman and poker-playing buddy Rick Elice are the Jewish boys/book writers behind "Jersey Boys," the Garden State of mind musical which has minted a quartet of Tonys -- and a guy named Frankie -- in its terrific telling of the Four Seasons story (vivacious in ways Vivaldi couldn't...

Theater

Faith on the Fringe

Wars and remembrance: Two stories, two legacies -- one thread of history

By:

Michael Elkin

Etty-tude: It is what kept Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew caught in the clogs of the Holocaust and the concentration camp at Westerbork, able to maintain dignity even as the Nazis damned her future. "If I should not survive," she wrote, "how I die will show me who I really am." Who she was is the subject of Susan Stein's...

Theater

Turning Over a New Leifer

The middle ages provide some surprises for this clever comedian coming to Keswick

By:

Michael Elkin

Root, root, root for the home team. Carol Leifer, stand-out, stand-up comedian and a roar of a writer/producer for "Seinfeld" -- upon whom the hyped-up heterosexually bent Elaine Benes is somewhat based -- has come out with the paperback of her book, When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win , and, with it, come out of the closet...