THE WASP • Albion Theatre

Olivier Award-winning playwright and screenwriter Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s thriller was first performed in 2015 at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs in London, and now it’s receiving a gripping St. Louis premiere courtesy of Albion Theatre.

It begins with a get-together between Carla (Macia Noorman), very pregnant and smoking liberally, and Heather (Ricki Franklin), smartly dressed and amiable. Heather has asked to meet up with Carla after not having seen her in 20 years since they were mates in school. Their friendship turned sour as they got older, and Carla can’t imagine why Heather would want to reunite after all these years, especially considering that Carla’s bullying made Heather’s life a misery back in the day. After a bit of awkward conversation, Heather produces a bag full of cash and an unexpected proposition that will change them both.

These two women have led very dissimilar lives in the intervening years since primary school. Carla is struggling financially with four kids and a fifth on the way, and a husband who gambles away what little money they have. Heather is financially secure, childless, and her husband is neglectful and unfaithful, seeming to flit from one obsession to the next. His current fixation is with the wasp of the title, in this case, the tarantula hawk. This spider wasp preys on tarantulas, paralyzes them with their sting, and lays eggs in the host, ensuring a creeping certainty of death. Predatory nature indeed looms large in the play, along with the cyclical nature and lingering effects of childhood trauma and bullying. There’s also differences in social class, mirrored down to the differences in the characters’ very well executed dialects.

THE TEMPEST • St. Louis Shakespeare Festival

Back for its 26th season, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival returned to the Glen Friday night under a cloud-laden sky for what’s considered to be William Shakespeare’s last solo-written play. This production, directed by St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s previous artistic director, Rick Dildine, has been streamlined to 90 or so minutes with no intermission, and atypically begins with a celebratory prelude. Alonso, the King of Naples (Kathryn A. Bentley), toasts their daughter, newly wed to the King of Tunis, allowing us an early glimpse of the royal entourage before their ship is caught in a violent storm on their way back to Naples. Not far away, Prospero (Nancy Bell), a magician and the deposed Duke of Milan, has been living with her daughter Miranda (Sigrid Wise) on an enchanted island after being left to their own devices twelve years earlier. Prospero’s brother, Antonio (Jeff Cummings), wanted to supplant the popular Prospero as Duke, and conspired with Alonso to send her and her then infant daughter off on a boat headed for the Mediterranean. During her years of exile, Prospero has been honing her skills and plotting her revenge, enlisting a fairy spirit, Ariel (Eliza Pagelle), to assist in achieving her ends. Then there’s Caliban (Chauncy Thomas), the son of a long-dead witch who used to rule over the island. The island, by rights, should belong to him, but Prospero uses her magic to bind Caliban to a life of servitude. It’s Prospero and Ariel’s sorcery that raises the tempest, causing Alonso, Antonio and the rest of their party to be washed ashore and scattered on Prospero’s doorstep - right where she wants them.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF • Fly North Theatricals

After learning that there was going to be a production of Fiddler on the Roof at the Greenfinch Theater & Dive I thought, “Fiddler? In an 80-seat black box theatre?” Fly North Theatricals answered with a thunderous, “absolutely!”, offering a nimble, high-octane staging of this much-loved musical theatre classic. Set in the turn-of-the-century shtetl of Anatevka, Fiddler is teeming with equal measures of the joys and sorrows revolving around Tevye, a humble milkman, his wife Golde, and their five daughters, all living in the ominous shadow of Czarist Russia.

In arguably one of the best opening numbers ever written, “Tradition” doesn’t waste any time introducing the characters, their way of life and the show’s central themes. Anatevka starts off as a nearly bare stage, but quickly comes to life with the everyday activities of its residents as set pieces are brought onstage and frameworks of the shtetl’s buildings are rolled into place. The members of this community endure through their traditions, but change always looms just around the corner. When societal shifts happening in the world outside of Anatevka creep their way into town, the ground beneath Tevye’s feet starts to crumble. How far is he willing to adapt and bend long-held conventions for the sake of his daughters - three of whom have dared to find their own love interests without the help of the local matchmaker?

THE END OF THE WORLD CABARET • Upstream Theater

When Earth, more specifically its inhabitants, disturb the cosmic balance, a comet is sent to annihilate those reckless humans and restore harmony to the solar system. That’s the set up for Austrian playwright, poet, journalist and political activist Jura Soyfer’s 1936 satire, Der Weltuntergang (The End of the World). By combining different versions of Soyfer’s surviving texts, Upstream Theater’s artistic director, Philip Boehm, has given Der Weltuntergang a smart, terribly relevant adaptation, continuing the season’s theme of “When Worlds Collide”. Soyfer’s play was performed in the basement cabarets of Vienna during a time of Austro-fascism, economic depression and the growing influence of Nazi Germany. The underground cabarets were one of the few places where Soyfer’s sharp criticisms of Austria’s authoritarian regime could be expressed. Similar to Netflix’s Don't Look Up, The End of the World Cabaret makes its point not in the impending extinction of humanity, but society’s reactions to it. Tyrants, diplomats, the well-heeled and the hard up are equally skewered, displaying a range of responses that pivot around foolish denial and an opportunistic resilience that would be admirable if it weren’t so depraved. Still, the playwright holds redemption for Earth within reach - a mercy that proved unattainable for Soyfer, who was deported to Dachau and later Buchenwald, where he died at only 26 years old, just days before his scheduled release.

THE HALF-LIFE OF MARIE CURIE • St. Louis Actors' Studio

Polish-born Maria Skłodowska-Curie, better known as Marie Curie, was a brilliant physicist and chemist. In 1903 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Curie, her husband Pierre, and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics for their shared research in “radiation phenomena”, making her the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. In 1911 she was awarded another Nobel Prize, in Chemistry this time, for the discovery of radium and polonium, earning her the distinction of being the only woman to win twice, and the only person to win in two different scientific disciplines. But that same year, an affair with a married man landed her in scandal. Her husband had died years earlier, but that didn’t matter. Curie’s adoptive home of France maligned her as a wicked, foreign homewrecker. Curie’s good friend, Hertha Ayrton, an electrical engineer and suffragette who was notable in her own right, came to the rescue and sped Curie away to her seaside home in England to escape the constant hounding from the public and press. This is the setting for St. Louis Actors' Studio’s current offering, co-produced with The Orange Girls theatre company, featuring Meghan Baker as Marie Curie and Michelle Hand as Hertha Ayrton.

Marie Curie (Meghan Baker)
and Hertha Ayrton (Michelle Hand).
Photo credit: Patrick Huber

The Orange Girls strove to find artistically challenging work for female actors, directors and designers, and it's fitting that they are co-producing Half-Life, since Baker and Hand (along with Brooke Edwards) were the founders of the company. The real-life chemistry (no pun intended) between these two actors is evident, and greatly elevates a play that keeps its characters confined to rather narrow registers. With both women excelling in the male-dominated arena of science, Curie and Ayrton could relate to one another on levels that few others could, and the slings and arrows that accompanied their successes made their alliance all the more vital. Hand’s sharp wit and outspoken nature plays well off of Baker’s melancholy, and watching them interact with each other is most engaging. But while there’s no question concerning the gender-biases they faced, playwright Lauren Gunderson's intentions are undisguised, reiterating these issues without providing much depth of character, and little exploration of what sparked their lofty scientific pursuits.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD • St. Louis Shakespeare Festival

What to do when you’re a pair of minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, waiting in the wings with no idea why you’re there? In Tom Stoppard’s exceptional Tony Award-winner (1966), Hamlet is seen from the lowly perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two unexceptional courtiers situated along the fringes of the play. Here, they're placed front and center in the midst of a plot they don’t understand and adrift in an inevitable progression of events they can’t control. In association with Albion Theatre, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival kicks off its 2026 season with a striking production of Stoppard’s play that plumbs existential depths with an insight that is, remarkably, as comedic as it is profound.

The fate of our hapless duo is spoiled in the title, but the slow realization of their ultimate end is the thing, as snippets of Hamlet play out sporadically in the background. Ros and Guil’s confusion runs so deep that they’re not even sure of their own names, and a game of coin flipping that comes up “heads” repeatedly sets the tone for the play’s absurdist suspension of natural laws.