This month, I’m rolling up my sleeves and plunging into two plays and two books that will recharge my critical batteries. These four brief choices will come as a relief after the doorstoppers I recommended last month. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman All My Sons was the play that finally launched Arthur Miller’s sterling […]
What is gained by reviving this play? That is the first question that crosses my mind each time that I attend a revival. In some cases, a show is simply beloved and that alone warrants a revival, but, for lesser known works, a director or producer’s motivation for presenting an aging play to a modern […]
Last year, I gave a rave review to an off-Broadway play called Hand to God starring a (possibly) satanic puppet named Tyrone McHansley and Jason, the timid, church-going boy who brings Tyrone to life. Well, this shocking and outrageously funny play capitalized on its stellar reviews and is now one of the best shows on […]
Everyone loves lists, and at the end of the year there is no lack of Top Lists that reflect on and revamp our cultural excitement about the past twelve months. Although we frequent playhouses and movie theaters to see new works/productions on stage and screen (barring the occasional revival or vintage screening), our reading habits […]
This is a very good season for The Shaw Festival. There isn’t a single truly bad production in the lot, Cabaret is making a splash, and The Mountaintop is a strong dramatic achievement. Among the more standard fare, Juno & the Paycock leaves something to be desired but everything else ranges from fairly to thoroughly […]
The strongest all-round cast of the Shaw season so far is about 70% of the reason that When We Are Married really works. Then there’s the 20% that comes down to the charming and insightful material itself (JB Priestley’s text is not groundbreaking but it is intimate, funny and sweet without being silly, which is […]
I don’t think we talk about Kate Hennig enough (related note: I saw her understudy in both Stratford shows last year and was thus Hennig-starved in 2013), so let’s talk about Kate Hennig a bit, shall we? In the Shaw Festival’s lunchtime show, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, four musical theatre actresses take on […]
Juno and the Paycock suffers from a simultaneous case of too much plot and too little, issues that do, counterintuitive though it may be, go hand in hand. Upon reading Belfast-raised Jackie Maxwell’s director’s note, I was intrigued by playwright Sean O’Casey’s Irish civil war drama. Unfortunately, the moments of war-torn tension and aching loss […]
Hay Fever is sort of like watching a Shaw Festival production starring Lucy Peacock (a Stratford staple if ever there was one). But not one of the marvelous Shaw Festival productions that showcases the festival’s eye for young talent, a dull production designed entirely to show off the set budget and give ageing character actors […]
Flat Earth Theatre and director Lindsay Eagle (nominated for a 2013 Boston My Theatre Award for her excellent work directing Rocket Man), should be commended for choosing to put on a show that delves experimentally into a fictional dystopia, a world fraught with troubling issues such as the extinction of the print book, a one-sex […]
Soulpepper’s 2014 season opener has a cast of great talents. The massive ensemble makes use of the Academy’s rising stars and the bench-depth at Soulpepper is so impressive that they’ve got the likes of Jeff Lillico and Evan Buliung playing bit parts and waitstaff (actually, small part though it is, Buliung’s gentle Austrian workingman is […]
The Children’s Hour is a Crucible-like story about the devastating effects of an angry young woman’s lives on those around her. In this 1934 drama, it is her two schoolmistresses Karen and Martha (played by Kathleen Pollard and Marisa King) who suffer most from the girl’s actions and who lose everything as a result of her […]
I desperately want to like new, emerging fringe theatre in Boston. While we have a vibrant fringe scene, such scene can always use support from patrons and reviewers, especially if it’s good. Porpentine Players offers rarely-produced classic and period pieces for Boston audiences. However, their inaugural production of the terribly difficult A Man for All […]
I always get excited to see a show that I have never seen staged. There is something thrilling about having no pre-conceived notion about what to expect, and being met with an entirely new experience when you enter a theater. This was the case when I saw Salem Theatre Company’s production of Bernard Pomerance’s The […]
I’d been looking forward to the Nora Theatre Company’s production of Terry Johnson’s Insignificance at Central Square Theater for months. Two years ago, the company produced one of my favorite plays I’ve yet seen in Boston, Johnson’s Hysteria. That play, about a historical meeting between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali, was a wit-filled romp that […]
“Never start a story with a description of the weather. Nor end it with a marriage. The critics will kill you.” J.B. Heaps does neither in his compelling new one-act comedy Private Disclosures. There is a great deal of truth to that quote uttered by Preston Sherwood in Heaps’ play – the best plays are […]
What is it precisely about social media and the advent of incessant and overbearing forms of constant communication that have led to the breakdown of meaningful long distance relationships? Shouldn’t the ability to maintain interpersonal communications allow two individuals to grow together? Or, is there some truth in the old adage that absence makes the […]
There was unmistakable and exasperated scream on the other end of the phone. “What?! Are you serious? How is that possible?” You would have thought that I had told my mother that I was pregnant with quintuplets. But no. That was my mother’s reaction when I let slip that I have never seen the movie […]
I have wanted to see a performance of Tribes since I missed Speakeasy Stage Company’s production earlier this season. It fetched some stellar reviews for the way that they presented incredibly challenging material. Unfortunately, Epic Theater Company’s production at the Artist’s Exchange in Cranston, Rhode Island didn’t rise to that challenge. Nina Raine’s script focuses […]
A. R. Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour is a witty, boozy comedy that shines a light on the many flaws and subtle delights of one WASP-y household in Buffalo during the 1970s. This autobiographical play centers on John (James Waterston), a repressed, neurotic publisher moonlighting as a playwright. John visits his parents in their twilight years […]
If you have ever taken public transportation, congratulations, you have shared a common life experience with a handful of complete strangers. For a brief moment, your lives collided in transit. Like a good New Yorker, I generally live in my own headphone-generated musical bubble on the subway, but, unlike most New Yorkers, I do not […]
It may be widely known that I don’t like original shows. I feel they’re often underrehearsed, poorly cast, and underrealized. That includes a script for which the playwright needs a few more rewrites. However, I was blown away by the Boston Playwright Theatre’s production of “Burning” by Ginger Lazarus. I can’t quite understand why everything […]
The Empty Room’s current production of RC Sherriff’s World War I drama Journey’s End is so much better than it seems on first reflection. When broken down for parts, 98% of it is in fine, working order. Some of that 98% I would even call excellent (Joshua Stodart’s steel-nerved scamp of a Mason, for example, not […]
The law is reason, free from passion. Point taken, Aristotle. The law is neither sympathetic nor scornful. Everyone is theoretically equal before the black letter of the law. Philosophy is all well and good, but let’s get real for a second. While the law may be free from passion, humans are anything but. This simple […]
Season Ranking: #7 It seems genuinely weird to me that, in a season of 10 shows, Major Barbara is the only George Bernard Shaw text being produced at The Shaw Festival in 2013. Now, I’m not a great George Bernard Shaw fan so that’s not a huge problem for me, it just seems a little […]
Season Ranking: #3 Every time I’ve reviewed Moya O’Connell in the past, I’ve made some mention of how beautiful she is. The reason I do that is two fold: 1- The major roles in question were Maggie the Cat and Hedda Gabler, characters whose beauty is talked a lot about in their respective plays; so […]