Reviewing the Drama: Broadway, Off-Broadway, Ballet, Movies, and TV Reviews

A two-section recap of news and notes from the week: Casting News Rebecca Naomi Jones ( American Idiot , Marie and Rosetta ) is joining the Broadway company of Significant Other . The Joshua Harmon play, which ran off-Broadway in summer 2015 , begins previews at the Booth Theatre February 14, 2017. Opening night is set for March 2, and tickets go on sale October 17. Jones joins Gideon Glick, Lindsay Mendez, Barbara Barrie, John Behlmann, Sas Goldberg, and Luke Smith, all of whom are reprising their off-Broadway roles. Theater Mania has more. Tony nominee Alex Brightman will play his final performance in School of Rock on November 6. Waiting in the wings is Eric Petersen , who'll take on the role of Dewey Finn beginning November 7. Broadway.com has more. Three-time Tony Award winner and Academy Award winner Mark Rylance ( Twelfth Night , Bridge of Spies ) will lead a big screen adaptation of the J.M. Coetzee novel, Waiting for the Barbarians . Deadline has detai...

"Theatricalizing the personal narrative" is written on the chalkboard. It's something Sherie Rene Scott  and Dick Scanlan  have done successfully (see Everyday Rapture ), and something, mostly on a lark, they ended up teaching to a group of incarcerated men. In Whorl Inside a Loop  (the title refers to your fingerprint), an actress volunteers at a men's prison, and teaches the men, all of whom have been convicted of murder, to express themselves, rehabilitating them through the arts. (Though Scott and Scanlan did teach in a prison, and many of the stories come from actual prisoners, the play is, ultimately, a true work of fiction.) In doing so, the men express that they are not the worst thing they've done. Indeed, these men—all people, in fact—can be the perfect peacock eye whorl, so much good and so much bad in one person. (As a guard says of Sunnyside (a cunningly charismatic Derrick Baskin ), "He's committed the most violent, most unforgivable ...