Ah, summer! The season of long evenings spent… sitting indoors in the dark. While most normal people are stirring the charcoal in the warm dusk, and even discriminating theatergoers are selecting just one or two shows a week from the summer theater cornucopia, I'm an almost-every-nighter. More than 50 productions are coming up on Valley and Berkshire stages, and I plan to check out—and report to you on—as many as I possibly can. (Yes, I am seeing someone about this.)
In a year when arts organizations of all kinds are nervously watching the bottom line, you might expect theaters to lower the common denominator or turn to small-cast shows with basic sets and costumes from the actors' own closets. But from what I can see, the summer lineups are just about as full, varied and adventurous as ever. While there is some strategic belt-tightening and crowd-pleasing at work—a few more musicals, two Neil Simons, an uptick in one- and two-person shows—for the most part summer theaters are counting on their patrons' expectation of quality and value, and counting on us to show up in sufficient numbers to keep them afloat.
The Sound of Music
Berkshire Theatre Festival kicks off its mainstage season with the most shameless of the summer's puffballs, Broadway by the Year, a cabaret of nostalgic show tunes from the Great White Way. It's balanced by one of my all-time favorite musicals, Candide, Leonard Bernstein's treatment of Voltaire's skewering of innocence and hypocrisy. After flopping heavily on its premiere in 1956, it has since become an icon of musical theater. It plays in BTF's intimate Unicorn Theatre, which has previously hosted pocket-size renditions of the Who's Tommy and Sondheim's Assassins.
Pittsfield's Barrington Stage Company also goes the Broadway route with its season opener, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, which Time once dubbed "the best musical of the 20th century" (but remember, this is the magazine that named You as 2006 Person of the Year). Here, too, look past the mainstage for less common fare. Longtime BSC associate William Finn presides over the company's Musical Theatre Lab, which develops and showcases new work by promising young composers and lyricists. This season's fledgling is I'll Be Damned, about a teenage nerd who makes a Faustian deal with the Devil in order to acquire a friend.
Barrington's Youth Theater mounts an annual musical too, performed by high school students. This year's, appropriately enough, is Disney's High School Musical 2. And at the Majestic Theater in West Springfield, the summer season includes Golf, the latest in the Theater Project's odd series of goofy guy-centered mini-musicals.
"Doing more with less"
That's what Shakespeare & Company's Tina Packer told me her organization is attempting in these challenging times. In sheer numbers, anyway, S&Co is keeping up its usual pace—a dozen full productions plus platform entertainments and other side events. But two of the three mainstage shows are revivals of previous hits—Hamlet, first seen in 2006 and toured last winter, and last season's Othello. And most of the troupe's other shows are decidedly small-scale.
In the new Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre there has already been a seven-actor Romeo and Juliet, and there will be an evening of two-character one-acts by Harold Pinter, a trio of one-woman shows, and three edgy topical dramas. The latter group includes White People, a blistering, hurts-to-laugh exploration of race and class which, for me, was the highlight of S&Co's Studio Festival of readings last fall.
Probably the Valley's prime example of doing more with less comes from the Ko Festival of Performance at Amherst College. Ko is the region's summertime purveyor of off-center performance by artists who are stretching the boundaries of conventional theater. As an economy measure, all this year's shows are solos, including the opener with master clown Drew Richardson, which takes the Cheekiest Title Award with Help! Help! I Know This Title Is Long, But Someone's Trying to Kill Me! But Ko offers "value added" to their performers and the public through a series of intensive workshops with the guest artists, as well as free rehearsal residencies and technical support.
Past Masters, Future Hopefuls
Summer theater has always thrived on revivals of well-loved classics, and this season has its share of those, along with some unexpected selections from the drama shelf. Barrington Stage is reprising Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire along with Anthony Shaffer's cat-and-mouse thriller Sleuth. Berkshire Theatre Festival makes an unlikely Ibsen choice with Ghosts, his then-scandalous drama of incest and insanity, buffered by Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue.
The season's other Simon, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, is at Northampton's New Century Theatre, directed by the company's resident farceur, Jack Neary. The area's only Tom Stoppard entry is New Century's production of Arcadia, his time-shifting demonstration of chaos theory. The company also offers the 20-year-old but excruciatingly topical Wall Street play Other People's Money and a quirky romantic comedy by the quirky Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House.
Willie the Shake also gets his seasonal due, not only at S&Co but at Hampshire Shakespeare Company, which this year delves into the Chronicles with Henry IV Part I, the play that introduced the world to the theater's all-time greatest comic figure, Falstaff. That's followed by Twelfth Night, featuring the Laurel and Hardy of Shakespearean fools, Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek.
On a less familiar path, the summer offers more than a handful of premieres. Barrington's Second Stage opens with Freud's Last Session, an imagined dialogue between the outspoken Jewish atheist and English author C.S. Lewis, a sceptic turned Christian convert.
Two new plays on topical themes come to the Chester Theatre Company. In Dov and Ali, a Jewish teacher and his Muslim student face off across religious and cultural divides. Railroad Bill is described as a comic satire "in the Mamet tradition" on the culture of greed—in this case, the maneuverings over a potential literary bombshell, the memoirs of the legendary black outlaw of the title.
Old Deerfield Productions unveils a new musical, The Last High Queen, about a medieval Irish lady, forgotten by history (funny how that happens to women), who divorced her arrogant husband the king and later defeated him in battle.
This summer's festive extravaganza at Double Edge Theatre, sprawling all over the company's 100-acre Ashfield farm, is their original take on The Arabian Nights, inspired by Marc Chagall's dream-like illustrations for the Persian classic.
Probably the sharpest contrast between the well-known and the untried can be found at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. The mainstage tends to established playwrights and familiar repertoire, while the smaller Nikos Stage provides a showcase for world premieres by up-and-coming authors. This season the mainstage hosts one of A.R. Gurney's WASP-angst dramas, Children, Sam Shepard's prickly dissection of sibling rivalry, True West, a knockabout 1920s farce, and Simon Gray's contribution to the repressed-English-boarding-school genre, Quartermaine's Terms.
Of the three new plays in the Nikos, the one I'm most intrigued by is Caroline in Jersey, by Boston-based Melinda Lopez, an actress and playwright who specializes in hilariously brutal eviscerations of family dysfunction.
For, By and About Kids
Most of the region's summer theaters run children's programs that perform for kids and/or involve kids in performance. Williamstown's Greylock Theatre Project, Old Deerfield's Clowning Around Shakespeare and Old Deerfield Alive programs, and Hampshire Shakespeare's Young Company all engage youngsters in theater workshops that culminate in original performances.
Piti Theatre Company presents its second environmentally themed family entertainment, Salmon Falls, at Riverfest in Shelburne Falls this month. BTF's long-running children's series gives the company's summer apprentices a chance to get onstage. And my personal favorite, Tom McCabe's Paintbox Theatre in Northampton, performs eye-popping, lickety-split deconstructions of favorite stories employing just three actors and constant audience participation.
Venue Listings:
Barrington Stage Company: Five productions on two stages, plus Musical Theatre Lab and Youth Theatre. Through Sept. 6, 30 Union St., Pittsfield, (413) 236-8888, www.barringtonstageco.org.
Berkshire Theatre Festival: Eight productions on two stages, plus children's theater. Through Sept. 6, 6 East St., Stockbridge, (413) 298-5576, www.berkshiretheatre.org.
Chester Theatre Company: Four productions. July 1-Aug. 23, 15 Middlefield Rd., Chester, (413) 354-7771, www.chestertheatre.org.
Double Edge Theatre: The Arabian Nights: July 29-Aug. 22, 948 Conway Rd., Ashfield, (413) 628-0277, www.doubleedgetheatre.org.
Hampshire Shakespeare Company: Two productions plus Young Company. June 24-July 5, July 9-July 26, July 31-Aug. 2, Hartsbrook School, 193 Bay Road, Hadley, www.hampshireshakespeare.org.
Ko Festival of Performance: Five productions plus workshops. July 10-Aug. 2, Holden Theater, Amherst College, (413) 542-3750 (after July 5), www.kofest.com.
New Century Theatre: Four productions plus Paintbox Theatre. June 18-Aug. 8, Mendenhall Center, Smith College, Northampton, (413) 585-3220, www.newcenturytheatre.org.
Old Deerfield Productions: The Last High Queen of Ireland: July 9-19, Reid Theatre, Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, www.cabotix.com, (413) 559-7678, www.olddeerfieldproductions.org.
Piti Theatre Company: Two productions. Through June 17, various locations, www.ptco.org.
Shakespeare & Company: Twelve productions on two stages plus platform events. Through Sept. 13, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, (413) 637-3353, www.shakespeare.org.
Theater Project at the Majestic Theater: Golf: July 9-Aug. 2, plus summer concerts. 131 Elm St., West Springfield, (413) 747-7797, www.majestictheater.com.
Williamstown Theatre Festival: Seven productions on two stages plus cabaret, Free Theatre and children's theater. July 1-Aug. 23, Williams College, Williamstown, www.wtfestival.org.
