Cyndi's Theatre Reviews for TRIANGLEREVIEW.ORG

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 Burning Coal Theatre Company's current production of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady, which runs April 9-26 in Burning Coal's Murphey School Auditorium in Raleigh, is guided by an inventive vision from director Jerome Davis, who takes one of Broadway's most beloved classics and turns it into something fresh, witty, and visually alive. Performed in-the-round and carried by a cast of only eight actors, this production never feels small. Instead, it feels nimble, imaginative, and constantly in motion, as if the audience is watching a kaleidoscope turn. Characters, costumes, colors, and settings keep shifting before our eyes, offering new ways of seeing a show that we thought we already knew. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--April-9--2026-Issue--Part-1--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-MY-FAIR-LADY-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=RkmDpEbzCTM

On Sunday, April 12th, Raleigh audiences in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium in the Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts got an afternoon with British statesman, army officer, author, and 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) -- or at least the closest thing most of us will ever see to one. In Churchill, veteran British actor David Payne brings the former prime minister to life in a one-man show set in 1963, after President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) granted Churchill honorary U.S. citizenship. Payne also wrote the play himself, shaping it not as a dry lecture but as a personal evening in Churchill's company. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--April-16--2026-Issue--Part-2--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-CHURCHILL-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=cs_og8IRPR8

 F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has always been a story about dazzle and decay: champagne towers, reckless wealth, aching longing, and the dangerous American belief that desire can rewrite the past. In the First National Tour of The Great Gatsby, that glitter is very much on display. With music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Nathan Tysen, and a book by Kait Kerrigan, this musical version of Fitzgerald's 1925 novel leans fully into the theatrical possibilities of the Jazz Age. Directed by Marc Bruni and choreographed by Dominique Kelley, the production understands that Gatsby's world must first seduce us before it can reveal the emptiness underneath.  TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--April-30--2026-Issue--Part-2--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-THE-GREAT-GATSBY-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=8Xj2YXj6PKw

 The Historic Forest Theatre on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus is a venue where history and imagination intertwine. Its stone terraces and tree-lined stage are an ideal setting for Stone Soup Theatre Company's ambitious production of Man of La Mancha. Skillfully directed by Melissa Craib Dombrowski, with music direction by Dr. Joanna Sisk-Purvis, the production takes full advantage of the open-air amphitheater to create a world where the boundaries between reality and dream blur. The magic of the setting was extended to the precarious weather, which thankfully bowed to the production and saved the rain for the final curtain call.  TO READ THE FULL REVIEW:

https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--October-9--2025-Issue--Part-6--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-MAN-OF-LA-MANCHA-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=1roEHrza8r4

Carolina Performing Arts' Nov. 19th and 20th presentation of Lost Lear was the rare touring production from Ireland that feels both formally dazzling and deeply humane. Dan Colley's "moving and darkly comic remix" of Shakespeare's King Lear takes a story that many theatergoers think they know and refracts it through the fragile, shifting world of the mind, with results that are frequently funny, often unsettling, and finally quite moving. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--November-20--2025-Issue--Part-5--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-LOST-LEAR-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=BiQaAn93YVQ

 PlayMakers Repertory Company's Nov. 19-Dec. 7 production of You Can't Take It with You proves that a nearly 90-year-old comedy can feel surprisingly contemporary in this moment of economic hardship and political divisiveness. We live in a time when people are overworked, anxious about money, and constantly pushed toward outrage. Against that backdrop, the Sycamore/Vanderhof household -- with its mismatched chairs, half-finished projects, and open-door hospitality -- looks less like a quirky 1930s relic and more like an alternative model for how to live. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--November-20--2025-Issue--Part-4--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-YOU-CAN-T-TAKE-IT-WITH-YOU-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=Gcy4kC7-r88

Naomi, a fiercely independent, permanently single woman in her 50s, confesses that she's pregnant -- not to a confidante, not to a lover, but to her boss's boss's boss in the waiting room of a gynecologist's office. The moment is funny in its audacity, tense in its impropriety, and quietly alarming in what it implies. This opening scene of The ArtsCenter of Carrboro's Feb. 27-March 7 production of The First to Know, written by Jessica Abrams and directed by Annie M. Taft, is a knockout -- an immediate, can't-look-away jolt that grabs the audience by the collar and refuses to let go as we all wait to find out the truth. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW:https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--February-26--2026-Issue--Part-3--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-THE-FIRST-TO-KNOW-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=WVOukEM_COI 

The North American Tour of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, playing Dec. 28-Jan. 11 at the Durham Performing Arts Center, is "event theater" that truly deserves the label: a blockbuster story wrapped around some of the most jaw-dropping stagecraft outside of Broadway. It's a play that understands its audience -- Potter fans who want wonder, nostalgia, and spectacle -- but is also smart enough to build its magic on something sturdier than wand flourishes: the messy, tender, sometimes painful reality of family, friends, and the fear of disappointing the people that you love. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--January-1--2026-Issue--Part-1--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-HARRY-POTTER-AND-THE-CURSED-CHILD-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=sx8akxYHRYg

Part of The Translation Festival 2025

The festival opened with a theatrical reading of one of the great masterpieces of classical drama. Euripides' The Bacchae, written around 405 BCE, dramatizes the god Dionysus' return to Thebes to punish King Pentheus for denying his divinity. The play explores repression, liberation, gender boundaries, and the devastating consequences of failing to recognize truths that demand acknowledgment. The translation was faithful to the original, but included more contemporary slang, idiomatic expressions and, in some cases, a few swear words. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/CORRECTION--Triangle-Review--October-16--2025-Issue--Part-3--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-TRANSLATION-FESTIVAL-2025-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=dKJLuQQUI7o

PlayMakers Repertory Company's new production of Steel Magnolias, which runs April 8-26 in UNC-Chapel Hill's Paul Green Theatre, gives us a story that is by and about strong women. In this production, it is directed by a woman and most of the creative team is comprised of women. Hallelujah!

Set in Chinquapin Parish, Louisiana, in the 1980s, the play gathers six women in Truvy Jones' beauty salon, where hair appointments become a ritual of friendship, confession, comedy, and survival. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--April-9--2026-Issue--Part-3--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-STEEL-MAGNOLIAS-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=MxE966eXeoU

At a moment when the United States is once again arguing with itself about identity, ideals, and who gets included in the promise of liberty, Raleigh Little Theatre's production of 1776 arrives with pointed timeliness. Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone's classic 1969 Broadway and 1970 West End musical has always been an unusual work: part history lesson, part political comedy, part chamber piece about ego, compromise, and conscience. Under the direction of Patrick Torres, this production feels especially immediate, inviting audiences not simply to admire the nation's founding myth, but to wrestle with its human contradictions.  TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--March-26--2026-Issue--Part-3--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-1776-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=cpA1c2eGBC0

In this striking new PlayMakers Repertory Company production of Macbeth, the audience is immediately catapulted onto a battlefield that represents not only the real world of political ambition and violence, but a spiritual battlefield claimed by dark forces. In Macbeth, the three Witches -- or, perhaps, something closer to the Norse fates -- do not merely arrive to set events in motion and then disappear. They pervade the entire evening. Omnipresent, watchful, and eerily in control, they seem less like outside agents of chaos than the atmosphere of the play itself, as if Macbeth and everyone around him are moving inside a destiny already woven. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--March-5--2026-Issue--Part-4--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-MACBETH-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=bFZl1yE2WcQ

NC State University Theatre's production of The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful is exactly the sort of gloriously theatrical madness that summer-theater festivals were made for. Written by Charles Ludlam and directed by Danica Jenelle Jackson, the production launches TheatreFEST 2026 with a high-camp, high-speed spoof of Gothic horror, Victorian melodrama, drawing-room mystery, werewolf legends, Egyptian curses, and just about every theatrical convention that can be lovingly mocked.  TOREAD THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--June-4--2026-Issue--Part-6--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-THE-MYSTERY-OF-IRMA-VEP--A-PENNY-DREADFUL-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=ag8xnPC3Dic

 If your heart needed a little extra "sparklejollytwinklejingley" this year, Elf the Musical at the Durham Performing Arts Center delivers exactly that: two-and-a-half hours of pure, candy-cane delight, wrapped around a surprisingly sincere reminder to believe in something bigger than our cynicism. Playing Nov. 26-30 as part of the WRAL Greatest Hits of Broadway at DPAC series, this brand-new national tour -- produced by Temple Live Entertainment North America and Crossroads Live North America and directed by Philip Wm. McKinley -- turns the beloved 2003 film into a holiday snow-globe experience for the whole family.  TOREAD THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--November-27--2025-Issue--Part-1--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-ELF-THE-MUSICAL-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=WRbAV1o1Nd0

 Watching Stone Soup Theatre Company's current production of Every Brilliant Thing at Mettlesome Theater in Durham is less like sitting down to watch a play and more like being invited into the home of a new friend. In a holiday season packed with spectacle, this one-person show -- performed by Brittni Shambaugh Addison and directed by Lavour Addison -- stands out precisely because it is so small, so simple, and so full of heart.  

Written by Duncan Macmillan, with Jonny Donahoe, Every Brilliant Thing is an interactive, one-person play about depression, love, and the lengths we go to for the people we can't bear to lose.  TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/CORRECTION--Triangle-Review--December-4--2025-Issue--Part-5--Cyndi-Whisnant-s-Review-of-EVERY-BRILLIANT-THING-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=oqHhlcnib2I

Enigma Theater Company's A Southern Christmas Carol takes one of the most familiar holiday stories in the world and shifts it just a few degrees south. The result is a warm, gently political, and community-minded staged reading that makes Charles Dickens' classic feel both comfortingly old-fashioned and sharply relevant to life in North Carolina. TO READ THE FULL REVIEW: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Triangle-Review--December-4--2025-Issue--Part-3--Cynthia-Whisnant-s-Review-of-A-SOUTHERN-CHRISTMAS-CAROL-.html?soid=1102365224669&aid=KhPCBLRh6gw