“The Price,” the 1968 play by Arthur Miller and third show of the season for Chapel Street Players, is cathartic. It’s cathartic to watch and must be cathartic to perform, with lifelong conflicts finally resolving into a peace with the past, fictional as it is. Directed by Ray Barto, who also designed and constructed the detailed...
This holiday season in local theater has brought noticeably fewer Christmas shows than in the past. Whether in response to the country’s political climate or by coincidence, most of the theaters in Northern Delaware are skipping the sleigh bells and carols in favor of productions that capture the feel of the season without trumpeting Christmas....
You might have heard about Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s “1984” on Broadway this summer, a version so graphic that people reportedly vomited and passed out during shows. Chapel Street Players aren’t doing that version, which just ended its Broadway run. They’re doing an adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian horror story by Robert Owens. Wilton E....
“The Pillowman,” Chapel Street Players’ final production of the ‘16-’17 season is not for the faint of heart. Simply put, it’s a black comedy about child abuse and child murder, detached from the real world with a futuristic police state setting. It’s a strange, twisted journey where fiction and reality blur, a horror story that...
Few diaries are as well-known (or as devastating) as the that belonged to Anne Frank, a Jewish teen who spent two years in hiding with her family during World War II. Chapel Street Players’ production of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” directed by Jeff Robleto, effectively transports the audience to the Secret Annex in 1940s...
When it comes to Christmas, Chapel Street Players like to do their own thing, maybe the most experimental of their regular season shows. “Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!)” features a trio of community theater actors as comic versions of themselves putting on a show. Tired of the same old holiday fare, they...
The Chapel Street Players are celebrating the launch of their 82nd season with their 53rd annual Renee G. O’Leary FUNdraiser – what better way to mark the occasion than with O’Leary herself gracing the stage as the wisteria-haired mother of “gigastar” Dame Edna?
William Inge’s “Picnic,” the February production at Chapel Street Players, is perhaps best known as the Broadway show that launched Paul Newman’s career in the early 1950s. It’s a story about loneliness, mostly, and love, and social expectations. When “Picnic” debuted in 1953, it was a contemporary play, set in present-day Kansas. Under the direction...
In his director’s note in the program for Chapel Street Players’ “Scrooge’s Christmas,” Timothy Sheridan talks about the perceived simplicity of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” “If it were that simple,” he writes, “I would not see the point in bringing their story to life.” Sheridan’s interpretation of Ken Jones’ version of the classic story,...
Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the 1946 film that became a cult Christmas classic in the 1980s, is getting a 1940s-style radio treatment at Chapel Street Theatre in Newark through Saturday. Under the direction of Brian M. Touchette, this simple, stripped down format proves to be a brilliant way to bring a story that...
