Tag: TAS

In “A Tuff Shuffle,” Charlotte’s Danny Mullen Takes the TAS Audience Backstage with Louis Armstrong

Danny Mullen will perform his one-man show, "A Tuff Shuffle: Backstage with Louis Armstrong," for the Theater of the American South (Brian Gomsak Photography)

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”

Triangle actors Jason Sharp and Betsy Henderson star as Stanley and Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the Boykin Center in Wilson (photo by Keith Barnes)

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.