Tag: TAS
In “A Tuff Shuffle,” Charlotte’s Danny Mullen Takes the TAS Audience Backstage with Louis Armstrong
On tap in Danny Mullen’s “A Tuff Shuffle” is home-made gumbo, cooked up by Louis Armstrong himself on his dressing-room hotplate, and an intimate but wide-ranging and remarkably frank and fearless PG-13-rated autobiographical monologue, punctuated with brief but bracing reprises of Armstrong’s greatest (vocal) hits, such as “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”; “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”; “A Kiss to Build a Dream On”; “What a Wonderful World”; and “Hello, Dolly!”
No Way to Treat a Lady: The Violence is Over the Top in the TAS Production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”
Tennessee Williams meant for Stanley be a crude, lower-class, but upward-aspiring American ethnic of Polish descent and for his and Stella’s apartment to be a pressure cooker, but I seriously doubt if he meant for Stanley to explode into physical violence — smashing crockery, manhandling Stella, throttling and eventually raping Blanche — as often as he does in the current Theater of the American South presentation of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Indeed, the violence that Hurricane Stanley inflicts on his sister-in-law and wife and their meager possessions necessitates lengthy scene changes that dissipate dramatic tension.