Stagestruck
StageStruck: Lost and Found
A dozen years ago, Allyn Burrows co-founded the Actors’ Shakespeare Project in Boston, following several memorable seasons performing with Shakespeare & Company. Like Shakespeare’s own London troupe during its years between permanent playhouses, ASP is an...
“The StageStruckies” — Advocate theater critic’s annual review
Winter is drawing in and I’m looking back on the many shows I’ve seen this year. Some have been naughty, most have been nice, and a few are getting lumps of coal from this reviewer. So here are my virtual awards — let’s call them “The StageStruckies”...
StageStruck: The Double Whammies – Part One of critic Chris Rohmann’s year-end theater review
Looking back on the 100-plus theater productions I’ve seen this year, I’ve noticed how many of them fall into pairs of various kinds. In my next column I’ll be handing out awards for the year’s best—and worst—productions and performances. But first, let’s take a look...
StageStruck: Eyre Apparent
Here’s the thing about theater: It brings performers and spectators together in a mutual act of imagination – and the simpler the stage, the greater the imaginative act. The lush British costume dramas that come to our TV and movie screens are essentially Classics...
Stagestruck: Anal Sex Meets Show Tunes – A new musical finds Don Juan on campus
I’m not a prude,” says Mark Swanson, “but it does feel strange telling the singers to be sure to enunciate fuck-ing.” He’s the music director for Donny Johns, a new musical opening at UMass Amherst this weekend. It’s a way-updated riff on the Don Juan story, set...
StageStruck: Six Degrees of Bloody Murder
The first time I saw Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller about a wheelchair-bound photographer who solves a murder while gazing out his window, I was so scared by the gripping climax that I couldn’t shut my eyes in bed for fear of intruders in the dark. Mind...
StageStuck: Flying Fishes
I have a friend who’s an Episcopal priest. When we first met, I asked him if his was a High Church or Low Church, referring to the degree of formality in the service. He replied, “We’re a Whatever Works Church.” That’s pretty much the strategy adopted by Abigail, the...
StageStruck: The Odd Quartet – Barbershop harmony, with an ethnic difference
Mark St. Germain is a founding member of Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield and its practically-resident playwright, having debuted eight scripts there over the years. His best-known works are fictional peeks into the lives of real people, including Sigmund Freud...
StageStruck: Main Street Parade – A 20th-century travelogue comes back home
Double Edge Theatre may call their Ashfield farmstead home, but they are a world-class, and world-traveling, company. In addition to their annual farm-spanning summer spectacle and small-scale shows in their barn-theater, for the past couple of years they’ve been...
StageStruck: NT Liveliest
If proof were needed of the sheer variety in the transatlantic fare served up by the National Theatre’s NT Live, we’d need to look no farther than the next two offerings in that stage-to-screen series coming to the Amherst Cinema. One is a classic Restoration...
Stagestruck: Endless Summer – Berkshire theaters carry on into the fall
Time was, at the end of August the summer theaters would fold their (figurative) tents and wait for spring. While that’s still true of the Valley theaters that brighten our hot-weather months, three of the Big Four Berkshire festivals now extend their seasons into the...
StageStruck: Industrious Angels
It’s all about possibility – “One of Emily’s favorite terms,” Wendy Kohler explained as we gathered in pairs and singles at the Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, ready to embark on “an immersive journey” inspired by her letters, poems and hometown. Kohler is...
Stagestruck: In the Vanguard – Women take center stage in the Valley
You’ll probably think I’m some kind of androphobe, or that I’m just beating the same drum to death, but after a summer when so many of my favorite plays and performances were by women, I couldn’t help noticing the same theme carrying into the fall. Turns out the...
Stagestruck: Women on Top — Female performers lead my best-of list
In my preview of this year’s summer theater season (“The Rohmann Ratio,” June 11) I made a tally of upcoming productions written and/or directed by women, or with women characters in central roles. Of the 49 productions I surveyed, 33 fulfilled at least one of the...
Stagestruck: Last Acts — Summer theaters wind down their seasons
As the season winds down, several summer theaters in the area have already folded their tents, with others running through this weekend and a couple playing through the end of the month. You can have your pick of a classic American drama, a classic screwball comedy,...
StageStruck: Small and Smart
My partner and I spend a week on Cape Cod each summer, and while the beach is restorative, for me the trip is also a very welcome busman’s holiday. By sheer good fortune, the timing of our visit allows us to catch two productions by the hands-down hottest...
StageStruck: Two-Handers
A pair of two-character plays now on area stages illustrate the crucial importance of casting. With only two actors – both of them, in these cases, onstage the whole time – the stakes increase. The players not only have to complement each other, artistically and...
Stagestruck: When Civilization Goes ‘D’oh!’ Homer, Bart, et al. as survivors in a post-electric age
The summer season still has a month to go — with new productions still in the wings — but already the hands-down winner for Most Intriguing and Strange can be named. It’s New Century Theatre’s season closer, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, a meditation on human...
Dance-Theater at the Pillow
I’m more a theater person than a dance person – though attending Jacob’s Pillow for the past three summers has given me a much greater appreciation for (and understanding of) the terpsichorean art. So this season I was especially interested in a couple of...
Berkshire What-Ifs
Four plays I saw last week at Berkshire theater companies demonstrate the variety and versatility of the region’s summer stages: a musical born of adolescent angst; a period piece with – a rarity in any season – an all-African-American cast; a glossy drama about...
Stage Pick: 70 Years & 4000 Miles
Leo, a free-spirited 21-year-old, has just completed a 4,000-mile cross-country bicycle trip when he turns up at the Greenwich Village apartment of his 91-year-old grandmother. He’s not just road-weary but soul-sore, having endured a tragedy on the road. During the...
StageStruck: Only Connect
“Hello” is the key word in two shows running at the Berkshire Theatre Group. One is a musical from the 1950s about a telephone answering service and an outgoing girl (more on that term below) who can turn a subway car full of strangers into a dance party. The other is...
Stagestruck: Three Pigs and Junie B.
Last summer saw the Valley’s oldest-established children’s theater uproot and hit the road, while a brand new one took up residence at the old stand. This year PaintBox Theater has settled into what would seem at a glance to be an unlikely new home, while NCTKids is...
Everyman … and woman
In the National Theatre’s ultra-modern new Everyman, God is a London cleaning lady and Death an ironic Irishman with a shopping bag for a scythe. It’s the latest in the Amherst Cinema’s NT Live series of HD satellite broadcasts from the London stage, and it’s...
StageStruck: A Provocative Gift
Silverthorne Theater Company, the Valley’s newest and most adventurous summer troupe, held a new-play competition last winter. Out of over 400 nationwide entries, Aidan’s Gift, by Kentuckian Elizabeth Orndorff, was the unanimous winner. I say “adventurous” because...
StageStruck: Taken By Surprise
Two surprises came packaged in a couple of plays that opened last week. One of those I had eagerly anticipated, while the other was quite unexpected. In Shakespeare & Company’s latest staging of The Comedy of Errors, the Bard’s early farce about two pairs of...
StageStruck: Ghost Stories part 2 – Three Henries
By cosmic coincidence, three shows now playing in the Valley and Berkshires feature three guys named Henry: Henry the Fifth, king of England; Henry David Thoreau, lord of Walden Pond, and Henry Antrobus, bad-boy son of the world’s first couple, whose real name is …...
StageStruck: Tapping the Tradition
Michelle Dorrance’s swift rise as a key figure in contemporary dance can be charted via her brief history-so-far with Jacob’s Pillow. She first brought her boundary-breaking tap-dance troupe, Dorrance Dance, to the festival’s free outdoor showcase, Inside/Out, in...
StageStruck: Women’s Choices
Three plays on regional stages this week – two at Williamstown Theatre Festival and one at New Century Theatre – have at their center strong women confronted by life-changing choices. Coming from three different eras of American theater, they nevertheless address...
Stagestruck: And Now for Something … The Ko Festival strives to be completely different
There are people in other parts of the country, reports Sabrina Hamilton, who still think New England is an all-white enclave of Mayflower descendants. “Not my Valley!” she cries, and to prove it, she cites hearing nine languages spoken in a recent visit to Puffer’s...
Berlin on Stage
Berlin is a city of cranes. Giant cantilevered arms hover over the skyline like H.G. Wells’ Martian war machines, still engaged in rebuilding what was bombed out in World War II or, in East Berlin, largely neglected until the Wall came down in 1989. I’d last seen...
StageStruck: Ghost Stories, part 1
Ghosts are stalking Western Mass. stages this week. Five productions I’ve seen recently are haunted – figuratively or, in a couple of cases, literally – by spectral presences that inform and impel the action. Two of them are reviewed below. The others, now playing at...
Stagestruck: Quartering the Pie
Two Valley theaters open their summer seasons this week, hot on the heels of two others completing their initial runs this weekend. The performances showcase the wide variety of work we’ve come to expect from the region’s hot-weather troupes. This week’s shows...
StageStruck: Impossible Dreams
Three early-season productions have at their hearts a quest — for a lofty ideal; for an escape from bondage; for a job, any job. All three quests are in some sense foolhardy — desperate pursuits of a shimmering grail. But all are, in their very different ways, utterly...
Stagestruck: The Rohmann Ratio
Following up on my latest rant about gender equity in area theaters — the lack of it, that is (see “The Distaff Side,” Sept. 24 and Oct. 15, 2014) — I’ve been looking at the upcoming summer season. While the push for gender parity in American theater has gained...
Stagestruck: Prose from Pros: Two books by local academics who are also working artists
In this pause between the winter and summer theater seasons, I’ve had a chance to look into a couple of recent books by theater faculty at local colleges. Both authors are also working artists whose practice informs their teaching, and vice versa. Peter Lobdell, who...
Stagestruck: Play by Play by Playwrights
They call it a play, but it’s hard work. While staging a theater production is by definition a cooperative enterprise in a shared space, the script that provides its foundation is most often a solo undertaking created in a private room. Playwrights are the loners in...
Tricky, Painful Negotiations – in HD
One is an expansive Shakespearean study of power and its fruits, another looks at an awkwardly intimate reunion of two ex-lovers sundered by moral choices. One is a heady duel between biology and spirit at the frontiers of science, and one is a philosophical comedy...
StageStruck: Homer’s Daughter
Jeannine Haas confesses that she “got through 21 years of formal education without ever reading the Iliad,” and that when she was first preparing to perform the one-person play based on that epic, “I thought, ‘Oy, it is gonna be a pain to read.’ But honestly, it was a...
StageStruck: Now and Then – Two plays showcase stagecraft classic and contemporary
You can’t say the Five College theater programs aren’t eclectic. So far this season we’ve seen everything from Shakespeare to Williams to Ruhl to experiments with future forms. And this weekend, shows on two campuses come at us from opposite ends of the spectrum: a...
On the National Tour
If you’re an avid theatergoer – and if you’re not, what are you doing here? – I urge you, if and when you’re next in London, to take the backstage tour at the National Theatre. After many visits to the National over the years, last month I got around to doing just...
StageStruck: Jerry Atric Puns Again
Early in Steve Henderson’s two-character dramedy Jerry and Ed, Jerry gives us a summary of his relationship with his pal Ed, and of his own character, too: “Did you ever have a friend who always seemed to get you into trouble? Well, so did Ed.” Jerry and Ed is a...
Madness, Mayhem, 24 Hours
“This is how I feel about the 24-Hour Theater Project: I think doing it is nuts.” That’s Elizabeth Foley, one of the organizers of Northampton’s annual festival of instant theater, which blooms and dies again this Saturday. The event, which she describes as...
The Price of Safety
Matthew Lopez has attached two epigraphs to his new play, Reverberation, now receiving its world premiere at Hartford Stage. One is from Jane Jacobs’ classic study of the American metropolis (“… cities are, by definition, full of strangers”) and the other is from...
HD = High Drama: Amherst Cinema’s stage-to-screen series is multiplying
“It’s an exciting time for art-house cinemas,” says Carol Johnson, executive director of the Amherst Cinema Arts Center. What she’s enthusing about isn’t movies, however, but plays. Valley theatergoers’ access to professional stage productions by global companies is...
StageStruck: Having It All — Two plays explore women’s desires and dreams
The playwright, says the director, “aims high here, treating … gender roles in relationships, the brutality of class difference and how it can create a crazy storm [and] serves it all up in a palatable way. What I love about the play — and what, I think, makes it...
“Nice Work” is O.K.!
They just don’t make musicals like they used to. Except when they do. Nice Work If You Can Get It, playing at the Bushnell in Hartford through February 8th, is a 1920s musical that premiered on Broadway in 2012. It was whipped up by Joe DiPietro from the skeleton of a...StageStruck: Men on the Edge
The Royal National Theatre’s NT Live initiative beams theater performances live (or time zone delayed) via satellite from its London stages, and occasionally from other British theaters, to cinema screens around the world. Now the popular series has hopped the pond to...Singapore, part 1: The Fringe
I was in Singapore last month when, by happy coincidence, the Singapore Fringe Festival, an annual showcase of alternative theater and visual arts, was underway. Over half of the festival’s 11 productions were homegrown, and I caught four of them. The performances (in...
Stagestruck: Sunshine and Shadow
As the year has drawn to a close, I’ve been looking back over the hundred-plus shows I’ve seen in 2014. And as the seasons begin to turn from the dark back into the light, I’ve been thinking about some of those theater moments when a dark theme was...Stagestruck: Carving the Pie
Two years ago on this page I looked back at the first annual Valley Gives Day, a 24-hour fundraising event for area nonprofits, organized by the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. The intention was to provide a common platform for local organizations...Night Must Fall
I was recently reading a play – Nightfall by the Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith – that reminded me a lot of a play I recently saw – Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance in its current Broadway run. Although one takes place on the other...Wicked and Really Wicked
A few weeks ago I wrote an Advocate column about the scarcity of women playwrights and directors on area stages – four and eight, respectively, in 35 productions last summer, a gender imbalance that reflects the national stats. And I might have added to that...Starting Off, Catching Up
Hello and welcome to StageStruck, younger brother of StageStruck, my column on the Stage Page of the Advocate’s print and online editions. This offspring was conceived from a pair of incompatible circumstances. The column is no longer weekly, and the...Five Gutsy Women
Women with smarts and guts are at the core of five shows I’ve seen recently. And I’m not just talking about the characters. This gifted handful are all actors who bring intelligence, style and emotional daring to their work, which they exemplify in these...The Unity of Opposites: Exploring difference and acceptance
Two shows on Barrington Stage’s two stages look at dichotomies in the fabric of American life—on the fringes of that fabric, perhaps. In The Chosen, two worldviews clash, mingle and reconcile through the friendship of two Jewish boys in postwar Brooklyn....Last Chances
The summer is barely half over, it seems, and already two Valley theaters are wrapping up their seasons. This weekend sees the year’s final performances at the Ko Festival of Performance in Amherst and New Century Theater in Northampton.NCT’s wide-ranging,...Bodies and Bodings: Two theaters putting bods on seats, or not
The title of Annie Baker’s absorbing play Body Awareness works on several levels. It relates to “Body Awareness Week” at a semi-fictional New England college (Baker grew up in Amherst, so even though the play takes place in “Shirley,...Three for the Pillow: Dance for newbies and connoisseurs alike
When Samuel Murez discovered Shakespeare as a kid, he was entranced by the extravagant language, dashing actors and epic action. As he grew older, he developed a fuller understanding and deeper appreciation of the poet’s genius. But, he says, he’s never...E-Edition
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