Theater review: Orlando Shakespeare’s ‘Charm’

By Elizabeth Maupin
Elizabeth Maupin on Theater

Katherine Michelle Tanner (Margaret Fuller), Allison DeCaro (Lydian Emerson) and Brandon Roberts (Henry David Thoreau) in 'Charm.' Photo by Tony Firriolo/Orlando Shakespeare Theater.

Kathleen Cahill’s Charm is a contradiction unto itself – a comedy with serious undertones, a history that keeps morphing into fantasy, a 19^th-century story that leaps forward into the 21^st.

Cahill’s heroine, Margaret Fuller, may have been one of the most formidable figures among a whole bunch of formidable types known as the Transcendentalists. But in Cahill’s hands – and in the exhilarating performance of actress Katherine Michelle Tanner – Orlando Shakespeare Theater shows Margaret Fuller forging new meanings for a simple word like charm.

O’Shakes announces ’39 Steps’ cast

Two familiar faces will be among the four actors in Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s cast of The 39 Steps, which opens the Shakespeare season in September,

Brandon Roberts, right, (Splash, As You Like It) and Brad DePlanche, left, (A Tuna Christmas, The Comedy of Errors) will play Clown 1 and Clown 2 in the show, which will also feature Spencer Plachy (below left), a veteran of the Alley Theatre and the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, as Hannay and Deanna Gibson (below right), seen at Florida Rep and the Riverside Theatre, in three female roles.

From the Fringe: ‘Creative Mind Experiment’

Fringe review: ‘Creative Mind Experiment,’ Jessica Mariko and Linda Eve Elchak, Orlando

By Elizabeth Maupin

There really is something for everybody (and a few things that mean nothing to most of us) in Creative Mind Experiment, Jessica Mariko and Linda Eve Elchak’s show-that-isn’t-a-show, which is different every time you go. Mariko and Elchak asked a lot of Orlando creative types to listen to a 3-minute piece of music and create a piece based on it. The results are wildly different, certainly creative and occasionally top-notch.