Stagestruck
Eastward Ho: Plays in Boston and the Cape
Jonathan is dead. His ashes are in an urn on the side table and his wife, Zaida, is packing his things away in boxes. Then the front door opens and a man walks in “wearing his face”—Jonathan’s long-lost twin brother Ernie, too late to say...Minority Report
“It’s so subjective, isn’t it?” wrote a friend recently, sending me a glowing review of a play we’d both seen and both failed to glow over. Most of us critics do try to be objective, putting aside, or at least acknowledging, our...Left-Coast Classics
Left-Coast Classics Dateline Berkeley — Just because it was Christmastime, and we were visiting family and friends on the West Coast, didn’t mean I wasn’t going to see as much theater as I usually do. And I did, starting in holiday style with a...War Horse: On stage and stage-on-screen in Hartford and Amherst
Every year or so, London’s +Royal National Theatre presents an original family-oriented play as a holiday-time entertainment. They’re often adapted from classic children’s or young-adult literature, inventively and often elaborately...The Best Seats in the House
I don’t go to the movies very often. It’s not that I don’t like movies, I just spend so much time seeing plays there’s little time for films. But there’s one cinema I attend regularly—to see plays. For five seasons, +the Amherst...For Pete Seeger, Who Taught Us to Rise Up Singing
I grew up in the theater. From the age of four I attended plays my father was in, and was trotting onstage myself soon afterward. I never wanted to be anything but an actor. Then, when I was 15, everything changed. I spent a summer at an arts camp in Vermont, where...The Bullies of Venice
For the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about *The Merchant of Venice, since I’m directing it for the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School in a production that plays this coming weekend at the Academy of Music in Northampton. If you know...Handspring, Handmade
Having recently experienced War Horse, that British megahit from the National Theatre, I was eager to see the Bristol Old Vic’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which stopped at ArtsEmerson in Boston earlier this month on a U.S....Lives of Not-So-Quiet Desperation
Two shows currently playing in Hartford (both through June 22) detail the vicissitudes of love and, even though there’s hardly a moment in either play when anyone is onstage alone, of loneliness. One is an often bittersweet kaleidoscope of 21st-century...
NT Live, Live
Since the NT Live series of satellite broadcasts of performances from London’s National Theatre debuted five seasons ago, I’ve seen almost all of them. The Amherst Cinema is one of hundreds of venues that bring the stage shows to far-flung audiences who wouldn’t...Jacob's Pillow Eclectic
“The Vinegar Works” began with an in-joke for PBS viewers: a recitation of Edward Gorey’s ghoulish alphabet poem “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears…”)...Big Apple/Big Easy
Ring Lardner was the master of comic fiction with a cynical edge and George s. Kaufman the master of urbane Broadway farce. When they teamed up in 1929 to adapt a Lardner show-biz story, the result was June Moon, an urbane romantic comedy with an ironic edge that...Take Me Out to the Storm Scene
“Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!” shouts King Lear in Act 3 Scene 1 as he rages in the tragedy’s climactic storm. But on the night I saw the play last week, at the New York Public Theater’s free outdoor Shakespeare in the Park, that line...Shoe Notes
“Tap predates jazz,” explained Michelle Dorrance when introducing an informal showcase of work by her students at Jacob’s Pillow earlier this summer. That is, before the blue note came the shoe note. But Dorrance is no strict preservationist –...The Two Sisters
This could have had the makings of an uncomfortable evening in the theater: a young company in a new play written to order by a friend of theirs, with an opening-night house full of friends and supporters ready to laugh lustily at every suggestion of a joke. Given...The Surprise is No Surprise
Two shows I’ve seen in the past week, at opposite ends of the state but with a common link, have received glowing press and, judging from the nights I was in the house, enthusiastic audiences. Dancing Lessons, at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, is a...Classical Classics
During an intermission feature that’s part of the National Theatre Live broadcast of A Streetcar Named Desire – this one beamed as a kind of guest showcase from a different London theater, the Young Vic – that theater’s artistic director, David...Autumn in the Hills
Theater in the Berkshires used to be a strictly summer affair, but in recent years three of the four major companies (Williamstown being the exception) have extended their hot-weather seasons into the fall and even winter, joined by upstart troupes/companies like WAM...Fearful Symmetry
Darko Tresnjak has a predilection for carefully composed stage pictures and a passion for symmetry. He’s also drawn to the arresting visual concept. In last year’s Twelfth Night, the set itself was a hedge maze, and in 2012’s The Tempest, both the...E-Edition
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