Toby Zinman

2 months ago | inquirer.com | Toby Zinman

“I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.”And we’re off. Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing looks a lot like all the rom-coms that have followed it in the past 400 or so years. The familiar setup gives us two longtime friends who will eventually discover they are so much more . The play opens just as a group of guys return from the war — it doesn’t matter which war, it’s just that the military establishes a masculine world of shoulder punches and horsing around.

Dec 5, 2024 | inquirer.com | Toby Zinman

There are so many ways for a show to be funny — wit (Oscar Wilde), rhyme (Stephen Sondheim), snark (Saturday Night Live), stupid (America’s Funniest Home Videos) — which we respond to differently with smiles, smirks, snorts, the contemptuous “HA,” and the cute “Aww.”1812 Productions’ show, The Play that Goes Wrong, currently at Plays and Players through the holiday season, is ham on wry. It invites all kinds of laughter, especially the LOL kind.

Oct 17, 2024 | inquirer.com | Toby Zinman

At Walnut Street Theatre, Jersey Boys opens with “Ces soirées-là,” the French version of “Oh, What a Night.” Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons’ Tommy DeVito tells us it was a huge hit when the band toured Paris in 2000. “I don’t want to seem ubiquitous, but we’re the guys who put Jersey on the map,” he adds.

May 17, 2024 | phindie.com | Toby Zinman

No one says a word.  This is a show—not a play, not musical theater—about bodies and the astonishing things this company of  23 dancers (led by Lukas McFarlane) can do with Kate Prince’s wildly energetic choreography. Mostly this is breakdance—much too much of a good thing in Act One, if you ask me— with glimpses in Act Two of jazz and ballet that let us see that these dancers can probably do anything. The two pas de deux are sensational.

May 5, 2024 | phindie.com | Toby Zinman

Now this is what a collective can do: a huge cast all so attuned to each others’ idiosyncrasies that they might as well be the household they are portraying. The PAC (Philadelphia Artists’ Collective) production of Gorky’s Children of the Sun, directed by Megan Bellwoar, is a knockout.