Neal Weaver – Stage Raw We don’t think of Mae West as a literary figure, but she wrote three plays — Sex, The Drag, and Pleasure Man. All were produced on Broadway, and all were closed by the police on grounds of obscenity. This seems hard to fathom, since nowadays they seem no more obscene (or even risqué) … Read more
Bob Verini – Stage Raw Diana Amsterdam’s The Dodgers, now playing at the Hudson Mainstage, deals with a December “Day of Infamy,” but it’s not the one that interrupted Americans’ Sunday morning breakfast with news about something called Pearl Harbor. Just short of 28 years later, on December 1, 1969, the government held a televised lottery to … Read more
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw Playwright-director-costume designer Octavio Carlin bills himself as “dress designer to the stars,” and his claims to be a fashion designer have a certain credibility. The gowns he has designed for the ladies of his ensemble are handsomely outre (and a program insert informs us that they can all be purchased at … Read more
Margaret Gray – LA Times J.B. Murray, the outsider artist and subject of the musical hagiography “Visionary Man” at the Hudson Mainstage, was an illiterate Georgia farmer who at age 70, after receiving a message from the Holy Spirit, began painting pictures of unbelievers in hell, was taken up by the art world and died … Read more