by Chris Rohmann | Dec 29, 2011 | Stage
I’ve been thinking recently about cross-gender casting. It came up again last weekend in Cymbeline at Shakespeare & Company, where 17 of the play’s 23 male roles were played by women. This was more a matter of necessity than an artistic choice. The...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 13, 2011 | Stage
Matt, the title character in Birthday Boy, is turning 40, a milestone that, as far as I could tell, every member of last Friday’s audience had long since left behind. The discrepancy made me think, and not for the first time, about the generational divide that...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 5, 2012 | Stage
I’ve seen 150 plays this year, and fully a tenth of them were by one playwright: Anton Chekhov. This is the guy Ira Gershwin was thinking of when he penned the lyric “With love to lead the way/ I’ve found more skies of gray/ than any Russian play/...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 20, 2011 | Stage
After a few weeks spent getting up to speed—auditions, rehearsals, juggling student schedules, all that backstage stuff—four of the Five Colleges’ fall theater seasons are poised to open. Over the next three weekends, we’re in for an absurdist...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 12, 2012 | Stage
People in the dark watching people in the light. Performers enacting a private reality while drawing their energy from the auditorium’s collective breath. The mysterious compact between actors and audiences, a shared understanding that without each other we...
