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by Anthony Chase

The 39 Steps
The 39 Steps, adapted by Patrick Barlow from the movie by Alfred Hitchcock and an original concept by Nobby Dimon and Simon Corble is a script that would seem tailor made for the Kavinoky Theatre. A spoof of Hitchcock’s 1935 film, the play uses bare-bones staging and spectacular comic invention to turn a cast of four into a wild adventure, seemingly populated by thousands.

Left Holding The Mop
Left Holding the Mop is a moralistic little piece of theater about a crisis in American education. Here we meet Lara Arek, an idealistic new teacher preparing to face her first class of students. She aspires to open minds and to lead her charges to the wonders of learning. What she finds, instead, is a system mired down by testing, benchmark goals, and an administration oblivious and insensitive to the educational process. She finds that good teaching is not valued but that high test scores are—no matter how they are achieved or what damage is inflicted in the process.

Man of La Mancha
MusicalFare does not venture into the classic Broadway musicals all that frequently. When they do, however, it often seems like a special occasion. Based on Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th century novel, Don Quixote, the musical Man of La Mancha is the 1965 musical that established the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut as a major incubator of American musicals. This show gives us the anthem to ethics and lofty aspirations, “The Impossible Dream,” as it recounts the story of its title character’s imaginative adventures titling at windmills and righting all wrongs.



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