Broad Street Review

2 days ago | broadstreetreview.com | Camille Bacon-Smith

August Bournonville’s La Sylphide, created for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1836 and performed by the Philadelphia Ballet at the Academy of Music (May 8-11, 2025) marks a historical shift from Classical themes to eerie tales of mystical creatures and untamed emotions. This is not the first of the Romantic fairytale ballets. It isn’t even the first La Sylphide; that honor goes to Filippo Taglioni, whose creation for his daughter, the famed ballerina Marie Taglioni, caught Bournonville’s eye.

1 week ago | broadstreetreview.com | Kyle V. Hiller

The Return of Benjamin LayMay 1-18Sedgwick Theater, 7137 Germantown AvenueGet a look at Pennsylvania history with this performance from Quintessence Theatre inspired by the true story of an 18th century Quaker who emigrated to America and settled in Abington and worked as an activist revolutionary who fought and advocated for the abolition of slavery in America.

1 week ago | broadstreetreview.com | Anndee Hochman

A $40,000 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant to Philadelphia Young Playwrightspromised to pay for a dozen teaching artists to work with 200 public school students—residencies that are about to conclude for the 2024-25 school year. A $15,000 NEA award was to finance the end-of-year show—including the salary and travel costs for a director from France—for students at Circadium School of Contemporary Circus in Mt. Airy, the country’s only accredited circus college.

2 weeks ago | broadstreetreview.com | Anndee Hochman

Jaci Brown, who is Deaf and lives in Trenton, used to schlep to Broadway for ASL-interpreted performances, making plans months in advance, if she wanted to truly enjoy a musical show. When she attended shows closer to home with her hearing friends, she knew she wasn’t getting the whole story. “I would be sitting there, watching it, thinking: the show is good, but I’m not getting the lines, the content of the story.

2 weeks ago | broadstreetreview.com | Anndee Hochman

It’s a giraffe, right? The figure stands sentry at the opening of woodworker/illustrator Katie Hudnall’s delightful, mind-bending exhibition, The Longest Distance Between Two Points, at the Museum for Art in Wood. Like other three-dimensional pieces in the show, this one is fashioned of salvaged wood, string, springs, and hardware. It has a long, thin, arc of a neck and a delicate isosceles of a face. It stands on three balletic legs, as if dancing on point. And it’s not alone.