Joseph Shrope Archives - TheaterScene.net

Joseph Shrope

Romeo & Bernadette: A Musical Tale of Verona & Brooklyn

June 1, 2022

"Romeo & Bernadette" is a musical comedy worthy of the name that delivers on all counts. Mark Saltzman’s spoofing of the old story is great fun and his lines are very clever. The score with its famous melodies transformed in new ways is a lush feast for the each particularly as sung by this excellent cast. Under Justin Ross Cohen’s direction the cast brings this far-fetched story to brilliant life. One only hopes that the threat of the real story of Hamlet comes as a follow-up. [more]

Rules of Desire

February 25, 2020

"Extremities" on a ship best sums up its playwright William Mastrosimone’s adept, if off-kilter, new psychological thriller "Rules of Desire," that’s been given a tidy production. In it, a dim 22-year-old U.S. Navy enlistee smuggles his troubled 18-year-old girlfriend in a duffel bag onto the aircraft carrier on which he is stationed. The couple surreptitiously sets up house in an airlock, but their connubial bliss is threatened by the licentious Chief Petty Officer discovering their love nest. Psychosexual hijinks ensue. [more]

Romeo & Bernadette: A Musical Tale of Verona & Brooklyn

January 27, 2020

"Romeo & Bernadette," a fresh take on Shakespeare’s oft-adapted tale of love, is an unabashed valentine to inter-era romance. Shakespeare’s Romeo (cutie-pie Nikita Burshteyn, perfectly cast) is magically time-travelled to 1960’s Brooklyn to seek Bernadette (beautiful Anna Kostakis who plays both the foul-mouthed Bernadette and the demure Juliet), a striking doppelganger of his beloved sixteenth century Juliet. There he meets members of two rival Italian mobs who substitute, 1960-style, for the Capulets and Montagues. [more]