Beyond Dracula

There's a whole universe of horror out there, so why must Actors Theatre of Louisville keep trotting out Dracula again and again, year after year? That's the question JSH asks in this week's Suspension of Disbelief, and provides a list of suggestions for spooky shows that might be a lot more interesting than the played-out old Bram Stoker bloodsucker. Read it here.

From Tumblety to Titus

Erik DeCicco, who played Dr. Francis Tumblety in Toulouse-inations (see image below), has been touring throughout Florida with Skrank Tank's production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged.


The show rushes through a whirlwind of comedic blink-renderings of the Bard's works, usually with rather warped twists - Titus Andronicus, for instance, is presented as a Food Network-style cooking show.

Read more about it here and here.

Reveling in the Obscure

Old is the new New, indeed: JSH recycles his "Forgotten Scripts" rant from the Catclaw blog for his latest column on Theatre Louisville, albeit with extensive rewrites and additions. Read it here.

Further Adventures in Retro Radio

On the heels of JSH's column on old radio theatre yesterday, the Voraxical Theatre blog now has further ruminations on the subject, with lots of downloadable goodies! Click here to get with the program.

Radio Drama

Jeffrey Scott Holland's latest Suspension of Disbelief column for Theatre Louisville is about the nearly-deceased (in the USA, anyway) art of the radio play - or what they call in Germany, Hörspiel, the cinema of the ears. Read it here.

The Shakespeare Apocrypha

This week's Suspension of Disbelief column concerns those Shakespeare plays that academia refuses to accept.

Read it here.

Our favorite one of those, The Birth of Merlin, has been planned by Catclaw for over a year and is finally coming to fruition as a puppet show. Stay tuned for further details!

Where the Rainbow Begins

Like something from DC Comics' Bizarro World, the story of the 1902 stage musical of The Wizard of Oz sounds like an impossible parallel universe.

Dorothy's pet is not Toto the Dog, but Imogene the Cow - both of whom are upstaged throughout the show by a waitress named Trixie. The Tin Man has a mentally deranged girlfriend. There is no Wicked Witch of the West. There are no Ruby Slippers. Up is down. Black is white. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of strangeness about the show. But for 40 years, this was the real Wizard of Oz, in canon, written by L. Frank Baum himself.

This week's installment of JSH's Suspension of Disbelief column delves into the lost kookiness of this almost-forgotten Broadway musical. Read it here.