SpeakEasy greeted 2017 by bringing the hot Broadway hit Hand to God to the BCA. Robert Haskin’s play about a young Christian boy and his possessed, twisted sock puppet buddy Tyrone is amusing, dark, and staged to great effect by director David R. Gammons. Jason (Eliott Purcell), wants to please his harried and bereaved mother, […]
When I rewatch the film Cabaret, I still find it difficult to listen to the final stanza of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” It doesn’t matter how beautiful the young German’s tenor voice is; even if he didn’t have a swastika band on his uniform shirt sleeve, even if he wasn’t raising his arm in a […]
In 2015, Boston theatre pulled no punches. Historical legacies were questioned, minority voices cried louder, the talent of female theatre artists was not in question, and plenty of performers strutted their stuff in drag, across football fields, through time and space and gender, and over lines of chalk. Don’t miss our 2015 Nominee Interview Series, featuring […]
A revived musical has just pulled into town. SpeakEasy Stage Company has brought back the musical Violet, directed by Paul Daigneault, musical direction by Matthew Stern, to the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion. Jeanine Tesori (music) and Brian Crawley (book and lyrics) first joined forces to adapt Doris Betts’ short story “The Ugliest Pilgrim” into a musical […]
Before the show even started, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins immediately won me over. I was at the BCA, ready to watch a performance of appropriate, the New England premiere of the play and a SpeakEasy Stage Company production directed by M. Bevin O’Gara. In the program notes, Jacobs-Jenkins pointed out how revealing laughter can be as […]
All it takes is one well-placed, often shocking line to permanently cement a show in my mind. In Necessary Monsters, John Kuntz’s new play, I ran into that line about halfway through the two hour performance, at the pit of this nested, Russian-doll-of-a-show. An upper crust, philanthropic socialite (actually a performer in drag (Thomas Derrah) […]
SpeakEasy Stage Company’s Far From Heaven made the My Theatre (Boston) Must See list for many reasons, but the best reason was the all-star cast. Somehow, SpeakEasy, under the steady leadership of Director Scott Edmiston, assembled some of the best talent in Boston for this hopelessly-flawed musical. The production is not flawed, but it’s hard […]
Carrie: The Musical has an awful book; there, I said it. Lawrence D. Cohen took every piece of camp from Stephen King’s popular novel, and removed almost all of the humanity from the characters to create a one-note musical of epic proportions. The SpeakEasy Stage Company attempts to amend this broken musical, but, under the […]