Stagestruck
Stagestruck: Turning the Screw
Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith is a gothic mystery-romance set in Victorian England. It’s a tale of devious crime, illicit love and cascading betrayals, with as many hairpin plot turns as a, well, as a Victorian novel. Alexa Junge’s stage adaptation, developed...
Stagestruck: Seeking Refuge
You wouldn’t expect to find close connections between the Sinai desert, urban Serbia and the Appalachian mountains, but a new play by University of Massachusetts theater professor Milan Dragicevich brings them tellingly together. Refugee takes an episode from...
Stagestruck: Guy Meets Girl
I feel a kinship with the musical Once, because in a former life I did my own share of street-busking, like the bluejeaned lead in the 2007 film. It’s a simple, poignant tale that’s both heartrending and uplifting, filled with simple, tuneful songs that strike the...
Stagestruck: Closing the Gender Gap
Every year I take note of the plays I’ve seen that are written and/or directed by women, and those that revolve around a woman (or women). For me, these are key indicators of progress in achieving gender equality in theater. To be sure, there are plenty of women...
Stagestruck: Song and Dance
In this time of national division and upheaval, we can be forgiven for craving a little feelgood. And what feels better than a good musical? As if on cue, two good’uns are coming to this area, both of them stage versions of beloved movies. This week through Sunday, An...
Stagestruck: Three on the Screen
The National Theatre’s NT Live series of HD broadcasts from the London stage is back for its eighth season, starting with a mix of new productions and encore screenings. The Amherst Cinema has recently reprised Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and...
Stagestruck: And the Berkie Goes to …
New York has its Tonys and Obies, Boston its Nortons, and now the Berkshire region has its own rewards for outstanding work in theater — the Berkshire Theatre Awards. Twelve professional companies in the Berkshires, southern Vermont, and New York’s Capital District...
Stagestruck: Ghost Stories
Neither of the shows now playing in downtown Hartford are Halloween-themed, but both are thoroughly haunted by ghosts of the past, in one case literally. That one is The Piano Lesson, at Hartford Stage through November 13. It’s the 1930s segment of August Wilson’s...
Stagestruck: Playing the Trump Card
You, my friend, are fucked.” So begins Trump Card, a one-man show created by monologist Mike Daisey that deconstructs the Republican presidential candidate. Next week in the Valley, monologist Seth Lepore performs his own personal riff on Daisey’s original. Lepore’s...
Stagestruck: Coming Home
I didn’t attend my hometown college, but I grew up just down the street from the campus. I biked along its crisscrossed paths as a kid, DJ’d at the college radio station in high school and, most important, acquired my passion for theater from its plays. Antioch...
Stagestruck: Fierce Visions
Last week Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, came to the Smith College campus to unveil her vision for the renovation of the venerable Neilson Library. Coincidentally, in Boston a new play was unveiled which recalls Lin’s uphill battle to fulfill...
Deep Purple: Campaigning in Trump Country, Ohio
I grew up in Ohio, birthplace of six presidents and a perennial bellwether in election years — neither red nor blue but the most unpredictable of swing states. Since I live in Massachusetts, in the bluest of the blue, earlier this month I went back to Ohio, where...
Stagestruck: A Perfect Fraud
“Consider Lucifer,” says Han van Meegeren, huddled against the grimy wall of his prison cell in postwar Holland. He’s awaiting a summary trial and probable execution for allegedly having sold a previously unknown Vermeer to a Nazi officer during the occupation. The...
Stagestruck: It’s Not Othello, But … — Two musicals from different worlds explore love and jealousy
In Othello in the Seraglio, Shakespeare’s Moor finds an ironic mirror. Not the proud Venetian general, but a proud eunuch in the harem of the Ottoman sultan. Subtitled “The Tragedy of Sümbül the Black Eunuch,” it’s a “coffeehouse opera” conceived by Mehmet Ali...
Stagestruck: Bedlam & Battlefield
In some ways, the two plays I saw last week in New York couldn’t be more different. One is a big, boisterous romantic comedy of English manners, the other a small, quiet meditation drawn from Hindu scripture. Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility, now playing Off-Broadway...
Stagestruck: An Immersive “Winter’s Tale” in Greenfield
Walking Through Time “In Scene 13, Leontes mourning his wife, things get a little more dialog-y. That needs to be run and worked on today,” says John Bechtold, creator of the immersive production of The Winter’s Tale that performs in downtown Greenfield this weekend....
Stagestruck: Magic & Mayhem
“If this be magic,” says Shakespeare’s King Leontes, “let it be an art lawful as eating.” On the Valley menu this week are two events that brought that quote to mind. At the Broadside Bookshop tomorrow (Wednesday), the multitalented Andrea Hairston unveils Will Do...
Stagestruck: Million Dollar Duo
As it happens, two different productions of the same show open on area stages on the same day this week. On Wednesday, Million Dollar Quartet premieres in the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, and the Majestic Theater in West Springield...
Stagestruck: Full Immersion
I was intrigued by the description of The Water Project in the press release I received: “Live theater joins forces with the Pioneer Valley’s thriving independent music scene in this original immersive production. … Immerse yourself in the currents of time in this...
Stagestruck: A Spectacle in Springfield, Rural meets urban as Double Edge Theatre comes to town
I usually find Double Edge Theatre on their home turf — at The Farm in rural Ashfield — where they live and work and, every summer, perform a “traveling spectacle” that takes audiences on an episodic journey around the spread. But last week I encountered...
Stagestruck: In the Heat of the Night
Thank you, Barrington Stage Company, for reviving this past summer’s hit play American Son. Thanks because I missed it in July and was glad of the opportunity to catch up with it during its brief return engagement. And thanks, too, because this run (through Sept. 25)...
Stagestruck: Read, Not Dead – Valley playwrights’ scripts come to life
For the six members of the Northampton Playwrights Lab whose plays are having staged readings this weekend and next, the performances represent the first public airings of new scripts and newly revised older work. Some are brand new, having received feedback and...
Stagestruck: A Voice of Gladness
If you’re like me, you studied William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis” in high school English class, and haven’t given it or its 19th-century author a thought since then. Well, I paid the man and his work a return visit the other day at his hillside homestead,...
Stagestruck: Last of the Summer Wine
The Valley’s summer theaters have folded their figurative tents, but looking west, the season isn’t quite over. Out toward the Berkshires, five troupes are still up and running through this weekend and beyond. Chester Theatre Company’s season closer is The...
StageStruck: The Ones That Got Away
I don’t fish. To be frank, I don’t approve of fishing, especially “sport” fishing, since, like hunting, it’s not a sport in the accepted sense, that is, a contest between two equal adversaries playing by the same rules. I don’t understand the outsize thrill folks seem...
StageStruck: Lifted by Song
So often, music makes all the difference. It not only has those famous savage-breast-soothing charms, it can turn a so-so script into a winner. Take Unexpected Joy, playing through August 20th at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT). This world-premiere musical...
Stagestruck: Cabin Fever
It’s such a pleasure to see a play in which language is as important as plot – a play whose dialogue doesn’t simply move the story forward but enriches it. Sister Play, at Chester Theatre Company, is such a gem – an absorbing, what’s-really-going-on narrative powered...
Stage Struck: The Blast of War
“Theater is so subjective!” said my friend as we left the Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company. She was in tears, but I was relatively unmoved. Ugly Lies the Bone, by Lindsey Ferrentino, takes an unflinching look at a searingly dramatic subject that’s too...
StageStruck: Sins of the Mothers – and Nannies
The Valley’s oldest and newest professional summer theaters end their seasons this week with two very different plays. New Century Theatre closes its 26th season with Jar the Floor, a multigenerational family drama that furthers the company’s reputation for putting...
StageStruck: Aphra; or, Behn
Aphra Behn was probably the first Englishwoman to write professionally, that is, to make her living from writing. She’s best known as a playwright, though only recently rediscovered by audiences. While she wasn’t, as Shakespeare & Company’s website has it, “the...
StageStruck: Peerless Pirates
Two contradictory things are going on at Pittsfield’s Barrington Stage Company. On the mainstage, the fearsome title characters in The Pirates of Penzance never kill anyone because they can’t bear to harm an orphan and all the captives they seize claim to be orphans....
StageStruck: Not Just Child’s Play
One thing these two very different children’s theaters share is respect for their audience. They don’t talk down to the kids sitting before them, they don’t ludicrously overact or get synthetically hyperactive in order to whip up some energy. The scripts are witty,...
StageStruck: Lost in the Woods
In the Subscriber Enrichment Packet for the Berkshire Theatre Group’s world-premiere production of The Stone Witch, playing in Stockbridge through August 20, director Steve Zuckerman says of the playwright, Shem Bitterman, “He writes instinctively, and it just pours...
StageStruck: Old Becomes New
Two theater pieces transmute their originals What happens when you take someone else’s work and change it, adapt it, and mold it into something of your own? I’m not talking about plagiarism, but homage – giving new form or context to an admired original. Two new/old...
StageStruck: Waiting for Life to Resume
Two plays at Valley theaters, both running through Saturday, share a common source – the ongoing Middle East catastrophe – and a similar circumstance: two Americans caught up in it, one unwillingly, the other almost compulsively. Both plays are receiving strong...
Stagestruck: Jacob’s Pillow — Tapping into the Essence of Dance
If dance is “the hidden language of the soul,” as Martha Graham put it, tap is its least bashful dialect. For the past few years Jacob’s Pillow, the country’s premier modern dance festival, has featured tap dancing in its eclectic roster of summertime performances....
Stagestruck: Shaking Up Shakespeare
Shakespeare & Company doesn’t only do Shakespeare. This season, only three out of nine productions are by the company’s namesake, though several others play with Shakespearean themes, from a contemporary reflection on war to a political farce that resonates...
StageStruck: Cat and Tat
Here’s one thing the two very different Tennessee Williams plays now running in the Berkshires have in common: The sets have no walls. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, on the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Stockbridge mainstage, four white-and-pastel pillars frame the sparsely...
StageStruck: Power and Value
Two brief plays currently running in the area look at the power and value of art through quite different lenses, but ask similar questions: How does a work of art “speak to us” as individuals? How does its character affect our perception of it? How does its very...
Stagestruck: English Stages, Part One — The National
Three of the four shows I saw at the National Theatre in London last month were star vehicles, and the fourth one’s ensemble cast featured a very well-known face. The first three also, coincidentally, ended in sudden reprieves from ignominious deaths. Another...
Stagestruck: Intimate Moments — Berkshires Summer Theatre Preview
Summer theater used to be known as “the straw-hat trail” and “summer stock,” both terms evoking familiar, innocuous entertainments presented for languid hot-weather audiences by (usually) amateur companies in tents, barns, and town halls. From the outset, though,...
Stage Struck: True Illusions
Two world-premiere musicals have just opened in the region. One is an unassuming little pocket piece with a nifty hook, the other a glamorous spectacular that assumes it’s going to Broadway. The Musical Theatre Lab at Barrington Stage has developed dozens of new works...
Winter Season Wrap-up
I see a lot of plays, and I cover as many as I can. But the feast of performances always overwhelms the column inches, so now, with a new summer theater season on the horizon, I’m taking a final look back at the shows I’ve enjoyed since last summer. Promising...
StageStruck: Seven Devils, Three Witches and a Nun
Halloween is half a year away, but there are devilish doings in the Valley, foreshadowed by witchery in Lenox. A one-woman show at Amherst College this weekend puts a clown face on a 17th-century tale of demonic possession, and last month Shakespeare & Company...
StageStruck: Revolting Children
When Matilda the Musical opened in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2010 – quickly moving to the West End, where it still resides – the British press greeted it as an “anarchically joyous, gleefully nasty” antidote to the sugary concoctions of other kid-centered musicals. (That...
Stagestruck: Loud Ladies
The subtitle of the best-selling book and its 1995 Broadway adaptation — The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years — is no exaggeration. Both the memoir and the play cover more than a century of African-American history, seen from the centenary vantage point of two...
StageStruck: Collision Course — Race relations, as seen from outer space
In some ways, the vigilante shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 can feel like the first in a series, soon followed by more headline-grabbing murders of young African Americans — as if Trayvon’s death, and George Zimmerman’s acquittal, launched and licensed the police...
Stage Struck: Othello’s Island — Shakespearean echoes on Cyprus
At the end of Act One in Shakespeare’s play, Othello is dispatched from Venice to command the garrison on the island of Cyprus, a strategic outpost on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean that is under attack from the Turkish fleet. So although he’s “the Moor of...
StageStruck: Bullies
There’s a lot of testosterone flowing in this week’s two picks: Butler, an all-male dramedy set during the Civil War, at the Theater Project, and Hangmen, a black comedy-cum-tantalizing whodunit from Britain’s National Theatre. In both of them, men use rank,...
Stagestruck: Stan and Ollie, Meet Punch and Judy — Serious Play’s “Endgame”
The story goes that Samuel Beckett was walking through a London park with a friend on a glorious spring morning when his companion exclaimed, “Isn’t this just the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive?” To which Beckett replied, “Oh, I don’t think I’d go that...
StageStruck: High Concept Shakespeare
These days it’s almost impossible to do Shakespeare in Elizabethan costumes. Every new production on a professional stage seems obliged to locate the play in some historical or metaphorical setting which – it is hoped – casts a new and relevant light on the...
Stagestruck: Vanya in Vermont
The irony of Anton Chekhov referring to his plays as “comedies” is often remarked. Most of his characters are bored to death and/or deeply unhappy, frustrated by love or circumstance or both, and his plays generally end with a bleak sense of hopelessness. But Linda...
StageStruck: Love Bytes — Looking at relationships through a fractured lens
Caryl Churchill’s plays have always toyed with the form and tested its limits. Her two most celebrated early works, Cloud Nine and Top Girls, folded historical fantasias into modern explorations of gender, sexuality and power. More recently, A Number imagined a...
Stage Struck: Games, Courtly and Pastoral
Two classics come to the Amherst Cinema this month via the National Theatre’s NT Live series. One is a courtly game of wicked wagers and voluptuous pleasures, the other a comically romantic repudiation of courtly artifice. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, playing this...
StageStruck: Class Act — A drawing-room whodunit indicts the social order
An Inspector Calls starts off like a good old-fashioned drawing-room whodunit, proceeds through a roller-coaster of revelations that incriminate just about everyone, and ends with a Twilight Zone-worthy surprise. J.B. Priestley’s play, written during the Second World...
Stage Struck: Ice and Anarchy
Mark Rylance has been widely hailed as “the greatest stage actor of his generation,” but he’s only recently become familiar to screen audiences – first as the quietly devious Thomas Cromwell in the BBC miniseries Wolf Hall, based on Hilary Mantel’s two-volume...
StageStruck: Monstrous Love — Two Valley companies share the wealth, artistic and financial
In a Valley theater scene that’s rich in talent and energy but less fortunate in more tangible resources like performance spaces and money, it’s good to see asset-sharing examples of collaboration among folks with complementary goals. Two companies are sharing the...
Bosom Buddies
“You know the story,” says Laurel Turk at the beginning of her fearless new play Breastless. “A woman is living her life, finds the lump, and suddenly she is riding a bullet train of doctor visits, treatments and fear. But the story I want to tell you is the story of...
San Fran Caravan
On a recent trip to the Bay Area to visit family and friends, I also (of course) saw three shows – a smart new comedy, a hit Broadway musical, and a big-tent extravaganza in which circus meets horse whisperer. When this area’s summer-season lineups are...E-Edition
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