Stagestruck
Stagestruck: Past, Present and Prologue
Two timely dramas are playing in the Valley this week and next, while a timeless tragedy is prequelled in the Berkshires, all of them grappling with essential questions of life and death. New Century Theatre’s comeback season, which opened with a riveting performance...
Stagestruck: The Shrew Problem
The Taming of the Shrew is Shakespeare’s trickiest play to perform these days – a thoroughly misogynistic tale in which daughters are auctioned to the highest bidder and the “shrew” of the title is “tamed” by a cunning fortune hunter. He (of course, he) is Petruchio,...
Stagestruck: Total Immersion
It’s summer, folks, time to get off our butts and take some exercise. A little stroll, perhaps, to enjoy the scenery – and a play. That’s the current invitation from two hilltown theaters. Double Edge Theatre presents a brand-new Summer Spectacle on its Ashfield farm,...
Stagestruck: “Culture is my food!”
This year’s through-theme at the Ko Festival of Performance, is Habitat (human) – a topic that also runs through two more current Valley offerings: How I Learned to Drive, from Ghost Light Theater in Holyoke, and Moving Water, a work in progress at Serious Play...
Stagestruck: Out of the Shadows
“Who knew?” is the question in the air these days at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. For example: Who knew that many of the great Duke Ellington’s compositions were written by someone else? And who knew that the pious religious community known as Shakers had...
Stagestruck: Dreams Deferred
More than any other summer theater festival in these parts, Williamstown thrives on stars. For the theater it’s a sure-fire audience and income generator, but for the stars it’s an opportunity. Here they can dig into roles they might not otherwise be offered, and...
Stagestruck: Upstarts – A brand-new theater and a newly minted king
Last weekend, Strident Theatre strode confidently onto the Valley stage. The brand-new company debuted at Smith College with The Final Say, a dramedy by local playwright Meryl Cohn. According to founder Susanna Apgar, who co-directs the show with Shakespeare &...
Stagestruck Abroad: The National Theatre, London
When I was in England recently, I saw two shows at the country’s flagship playhouse, the National Theatre. One is a new play, the other a timely revival, both of them responding to current hot topics. Small Island, the premiere, reflects the crisis of...
Stagestruck: Ghosts on Summer Stages
The best thing about summer theater in this region is its variety. Last weekend, for instance, I saw an Irish drama, an American musical and a world premiere. The premiere, at Barrington Stage Company, is a metaphor within a satire that becomes an indictment. America...
Stagestruck Abroad: The Bard
When I was in London this month, I saw two Shakespeare plays. No, make that two and a half: the Bard’s most popular comedy, one of his least performed, and a new play in which he’s a character – and a plagiarist. Just a stroll along Thameside from the National...
Stagestruck Abroad: Norway
One of the first things I noticed about Norway when I was there earlier this month – along with the brisk air, the clean streets, and the tall blondes (and taller blonds) striding along those streets – was the 19 hours of daylight. Not quite “midnight sun,” but it...
Stagestruck: Grand Openings – Summer theaters busting out all over
The summer season has been slowly gaining momentum, and this week it explodes, with 10 shows in the Valley and Berkshires opening or already up and running. Among these are a pair of classic musicals, two uncommon love stories set in Ireland, a satirical look at...
Stagestruck: Hot Topics – Summer theaters reflect the times
Hamlet, we recall, reminded the players visiting Elsinore that the theater’s job is to reflect “the very age and body of the time.” Times being what they are, it’s no surprise that quite a number of shows this summer do just that. The schedule in the Valley and...
Stagestruck: Classics Revisited – Masterpieces coming to summer stages
In a season studded with world premieres (five at Williamstown Theatre Festival alone and three at Barrington Stage Company, for example), I’m equally struck by some of the revivals coming up in the Valley and Berkshires this summer. I don’t mean chestnuts from the...
Stagestruck: The Flamingo Kid cruises into Hartford
I missed The Flamingo Kid when the Garry Marshall movie came out in 1984, but I recently caught up with it. It’s a coming-of-age story that takes place in the summer of 1963, the era of Marshall’s TV series Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. Although it was...
Stagestruck: Summer Theater Preview – New & Different
I’m looking at my summer theater calendar and counting over 60 productions due up over the next three lively months in the Valley and beyond. Some dozen world premieres, along with even more regional premieres, stand alongside classics from Ibsen to Albee, not to...
Stagestruck on Broadway: Family Squabbles – the Clintons and the Lears
Two plays now on Broadway for limited runs, a world classic and a world premiere, revolve around fractured families whose dynastic dreams turn sour. One involves the ambitious daughters of an English king, the other the ambitious wife of a former U.S. president....
Stagestruck: Pre-Season Previews – Summer begins, spring continues
There’s usually a bit of a lull between the end of one theater season and the start of the next – the spring pause before the summer rush. But the pause keeps getting briefer and the seasons are starting to overlap. Take this week, when three Berkshire theaters open...
Stagestruck: Scully, Scandal, and Buckets of Blood – National Theatre Live in Amherst
Two revisioned classics, a brand-new political drama, and some audience favorites are on tap in the Amherst Cinema’s series of broadcasts from the London stage via National Theatre Live. First up, this Saturday and again on the 14th, is Shakespeare’s most lyrical...
Stagestruck: Liaisons, both neighborly and dangerous, at the Bushnell
When the twin towers crumpled on September 11, 2001, American airspace was closed for fear of further attacks and all U.S.-bound flights were diverted to other airports. One of these was Gander International, i n Newfoundland, where 38 airliners landed, carrying...
Stagestruck: Around the World in 80 Minutes
Jules Verne’s 1873 novel/travelogue, Around the World in 80 Days, is best remembered these days from its movie versions, including Disney’s in 2004 and the Oscar-winning three-hour blockbuster from 1956, both of them teeming with exotic multitudes and spectacular...
Stagestruck: The Dollar Princess – WAM Theatre premieres “Lady Randy”
Anne Undeland, the playwright and star of Lady Randy, says she wanted to find a 19th-century woman to build a one-person show around. “It soon became clear that if I wanted name recognition, I had to find a woman who was associated with a famous man. Dammit!” She...
Stagestruck: Community Colleges Get in on the Act
I often write in these pages about theater at the Five Colleges, all of which have robust degree programs and busy production seasons. But I don’t pay as much attention to the Valley’s other academic theaters as they deserve, and I’m going to partially correct that...
Stagestruck: Angles and Aliens — Three productions take a slanted view of our world
These are precarious days, observes Peter Schumann, founder and director of Bread & Puppet Theater. The social order, the democratic contract and the earth itself are tottering from unprecedented stresses. Bread & Puppet’s Diagonal Life: Theory and Praxis,...
Stagestruck: Shakespearean Trifecta
It’s the Bard’s birthday next week, and three shows on area stages are celebrating it. (Shakespeare’s actual birthdate is unknown, but it was sometime around April 23, 1564, and since he died on April 23, 1616, that symmetry has become traditional.) This weekend and...
Stagestruck: ‘Death of a Salesman’ and ‘The Tattooed Man Tells All’
Two plays coming to area campuses this week and next have starkly different, but equally pessimistic takes on life and death. Death of a Salesman, at Springfield College, finds tragedy in an ordinary life, while The Tattooed Man Tells All, at Smith College, draws...
Stagestruck: New Kid on the Block
There’s a new theater company in the Valley, with a kick-ass name and no less a purpose than helping to “undo established hierarchical structures and their attendant damage.” It’s called Strident Theatre, and its vociferous founder is actor/director/playwright Susanna...
Stagestruck: Imperfect “Nonsense”
My brother is the world’s biggest P.G. Wodehouse fan. Well, maybe not the biggest — he’s got legions of competitors for that title — but big enough to have come up from his home in New Jersey to accompany me to the American premiere of a new Wodehouse-derived play....
Stagestruck: 25 Years on the Edge
In 1994, Stacy Klein moved her adventurous company, Double Edge Theatre, from Boston to a former dairy farm in rural Ashfield, and started milking the Muse. A quarter-century later, the 100-acre spread is home to a resident company of artists and a hub of visceral,...
Stagestruck: Blood, Tears & “Sweat” – Two plays reflect on the past and echo the present
Two of the Five Colleges’ season-ending productions, both by award-winning women playwrights, hark back to moments in recent history that continue to reverberate. One takes place in a remote backwater, the other in the industrial heartland, but they share themes of...
Stagestruck Abroad: Toronto — Shades of Identity
Greetings from Toronto, where it’s still winter, the wind whipping in from Lake Ontario is keen and bracing, and so is the theater. I’ve seen two plays here, a one-man show and an eight-woman show, both of them the work of bi-cultural authors, performed in key venues...
Stagestruck: Degrees of Separation — Putting the opioid crisis center stage
Eight people are seated in a semi-circle at a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous. They are actually actors in a play, but though they’re not the recovering addicts they portray, each of them has a real-life connection to the nation’s — and the Valley’s — opioid crisis....
Stagestruck: Infinite Chances for Love
Nick Payne’s time- and mind-bending play Constellations receives its local premiere this month at Gateway City Arts, a production of Ghost Light Theater, the Valley’s five-year-old purveyor of contemporary plays that speak to universal themes. The piece has made its...
Stagestruck: Happier Valley Comedy – Joy in the unexpected
Scott Braidman is giving me a tour of his workplace, the Hadley headquarters of Happier Valley Comedy, of which he’s the artistic director. It’s a bright, welcoming space in the Mill Valley Commons, a mixed-purpose building fronted by Route 9 and backed by cornfields....
Stagestruck: Motor City Soul
There’s a party going on in the basement of Chelle and Lank’s house – an unlicensed after-hours drink-and-dance dive in inner-city Detroit. That is, until a police raid on a similar establishment explodes into violence and the neighborhood goes up in flames. Detroit...
Stagestruck: Center Stage for Seniors
Two elder ensembles are this week’s headliners. The Berkshire-based WAM Theatre has just announced its plans for a troupe of women over 65, and the latest offering from the British stage in the popular National Theatre Live series features a cast of old folks....
Stagestruck: Big Apple Bites
At first glance, you’d think the two plays I saw in New York City last week have little in common. One is an international import from London to Broadway, the other an Off-Broadway transfer from a small regional theater in Vermont. One is twice as long as the other...
Stagestruck: Mashups in Makeup
How’s this for genre mashups: Brontë gothic in which two of the characters are animals. Wildean romcom in which all the actors are women. Golden Age Spain in which a woman lives as a man. Multidisciplinary invention in which diversity seeks community. Renaissance...
Stagestruck: Hi, Honey, I’m Home!
When Nora Helmer famously slammed the door on her empty marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, she changed the course of theatrical history, and social history as well. But shutting the door on one story implicitly opened another, and thus left a...
Stagestruck: Conversations and Conflicts
Theater, Sheryl Stoodley firmly believes, “can be the starting point for conversations – much-needed at this point in our United States and in the world.” To that end, Serious Play, the theater Stoodley leads, “works toward reshaping society’s conversation on...
Stagestruck: Found and Lost
In a program note for The Engagement Party, Samuel Baum says his play is “an exploration of secrets and lies.” Which puts it right in his wheelhouse, as his credits include the TV psycho-crime drama Lie to Me and the movie Wizard of Lies. He says he’s also interested...
Stagestruck: Having a Go, Script in Hand
Allyn Burrows, Shakespeare & Company’s artistic director, calls it “a great way to get out in the middle of winter … a great opportunity for the audience to let their imaginations just run wild.” It’s the theater’s annual Studio Festival, a weekend of...
Stagestruck: Happening New Year — Valley stages ring in the 2019 season
Barely two weeks into the new year and already my theatergoing calendar is crowded with upcoming shows. From an operatic Sweeney Todd to a historical fantasy to a “pseudo-historical psycho-romance,” to pick three for this month, 2019 is off to a promising start. The...
Stagestruck: Six Degrees of Connection – The Berkshires’ Year in Theater
Six theater companies form a kind of chain across the southern and western Berkshires. From the closest to the Valley to the farthest, they are the hilltowns’ Chester Theatre Company, then westward (passing dance mecca Jacob’s Pillow) to Shakespeare & Company in...
Valley Variety — 2018 in Review
I attended over 30 theater productions in the Valley this year, but that wasn’t half of what was on stage. What struck me most was the variety of fare – from the breadth of established companies’ seasons, to the ethnic and gender diversity on campus stages, to...
Stagestruck: Not Throwin’ Away My Shot at “Hamilton”
What is there to say that you don’t already know about Hamilton, the game-changing musical that costs a bank loan to see on Broadway and is now on tour, where this month it’s at the Bushnell in Hartford for only an ATM max-out? Playing through Dec. 30 (by far the...
Stagestruck: Angels in Middle America
Harrison David Rivers specifies that his play When Last We Flew takes place in “a small town in Kansas (NOT Kansas City).” He also specifies that all eight characters are people of color. And that two of them are gay. As it opens, we find 17-year-old Paul in the...
Stagestruck: Staged Readings — the key to writing “your best play”
In a program note for his play The War and Walt Whipple, now running at the Majestic Theater, author/director Danny Eaton describes the play’s page-to-stage gestation. First, “a few friends” saw a draft and offered comments, leading to a staged reading with audience...
Stagestruck: The War Within
Every couple of years, Danny Eaton premieres a new play of his at the Majestic Theater, which he founded and leads. They range through topics dear to him, often touching on military service and veterans (he’s one himself) and all of them, in one way or another,...
Stagestruck: King Lear on NT Live
I’ll get right to the point. The King Lear I saw last weekend courtesy of NT Live is the most thoughtfully conceived, perceptively acted and richly achieved production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy I’ve ever seen. It stars Ian McKellen, and that in itself more...
Stagestruck: Latin Roots
Two productions in the Valley this weekend and next share Latin American roots, and couldn’t be more dissimilar. One is a colorful musical celebrating a New York barrio, the other a surreal movement-theater piece celebrating two surrealists. The sensational success of...
Stagestruck: Art and Identity — Valley plays confront life-changing issues
Three plays in the Valley this weekend and next tackle provocative questions of art and identity. A woman musician is deprived of a career because of her gender. Two writers tangle in a carnal mix of sex and ambition. And an actor looks at the black experience via...
Stagestruck: Valley Variations — Celebrating words and music, autumn and murder
A demon barber, a cockroach killer, a charitable speller, a balletic frog. This month, up and down the Valley, indoors and out, intimate and expansive, there’s a seasonal bounty of performances to choose from. The Royal Frog Ballet is an “amoeba of...
Stagestruck: Three for the Show
An instant evening of theater cooked up in a single day; a 19th-century musical with 21st-century themes; a multi-disciplinary evocation of “what is left when memory is gone.” This weekend in the Valley, there’s a diverse trio of shows to choose from – or see...
Stagestruck Weekend: Coming Back to Life, in the (413)
In the past, Life in the (413), New Century Theatre’s live-on-stage roast of all things Valley, was aimed at boosting its upcoming summer program. The sixth iteration, at the Academy of Music on Sunday, is aimed at reviving the company after its sudden collapse a year...
Stagestruck: Imaginary Forces
In Shakespeare’s time, actors wore their own clothes with token costume pieces, they performed on a bare platform, and they were all male. Those facts are the springboard of Elizabeth Williamson’s vision for her production of Henry V, which plays at Hartford Stage...
Stagestruck: Two in the Berkshires – Naked & The Glass Menagerie
A desperate young woman, Ersilia Drei, has attempted suicide. From her hospital bed, she spins a heartrending, headline-grabbing story for an opportunistic reporter. His article draws a circle of interested parties into her twisting orbit: The novelist who sees in her...
Stagestruck: Stage to Screen
The live-capture stage-to-screen season at the Amherst Cinema has begun, with a lineup of adaptations of world classics from the London stage – a dance-happy movie musical, a steamy exploration of transgressive desire, a surreal whodunnit, a Gothic horror story – plus...
Stagestruck: Not Your Granddad’s College Theater
“What am I bid for this fine specimen of white manhood?” The swaggering black auctioneer scans the audience of prospective buyers, who quickly bid the price up, until the white man on the auction block goes to the jubilant winner for a fat five-figure sum. This...E-Edition
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