The Independent Drama Society started on shaky ground. Founded by a bunch of BU grads newly ineligible for the theatre groups they’d come to love in college, IDS cobbled together its earliest productions, recruiting inexperienced players and volunteer tech teams to put on plays with few resources and small audiences. The result was some very […]
In Jane Carnwath’s production of Hedda Gabler this fall at Alumnae Theatre, Ibsen’s complex play about a caged animal of a woman was done excellent justice. Using Judith Thompson’s clever translation, the company effectively turned the beautifully intimate studio theatre into a claustrophobic den of domesticity in which Sochi Fried’s Hedda spiraled into fascinating madness. […]
The Actor’s Shakespeare Project’s Coveted Crown begins and ends each piece of the puzzle with a song. The fabulous Bobbie Steinbach, armed with a tambourine and the acoustic backup of the humming ensemble, tells us everything we need to know going into the prologue (excerpts from Richard II, starring the sometimes affected/sometimes effective Marya Lowry). […]
I spent my Thursday night in a packed house. And I don’t mean I sat in the 99-seat student theatre with people on either side, I mean I got to the 500-seat auditorium an hour early and had to fight for my prime vantage point. The production played to a competitively sold-out crowd for 3 […]
Clunky direction and unattainable goals quickly became the central problems of BU Stage Troupe’s recent production of A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s an epic piece, not in the classical sense of scope but in the sense of how famous, how challenging, how iconic the work is. It’s a little beyond college students. This group did […]
The director’s note for BU Stage Troupe’s recent production of Rabbit Hole by David Linsay-Abaire was simple and true. Directors Chris Hamilton and Agatha Babbitt wanted the audience to know that what they were about to watch was not a tragedy. Rather it was a glimpse into the lives of a family who’d suffered a […]
I wish I had gotten this review out earlier for many reasons. Of course it would have been nice if the show was still running and maybe some of you reading this could decide to go see it on my recommendation; it’s also a lot easier to write with the show freshly in mind. But […]
Here’s the thing: the backstage aspects of The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s production of Kiss Me Kate (you know, the parts where the actors are playing actors, not the parts where the actors are playing actors playing some of Shakespeare’s broadest characters) made for a cute, light and altogether not all bad musical. That stuff, the […]