Stage
Seeing the Valley in Stages
By the time I started writing in these pages 22 years ago, the Advocate was already a teenager and the glory days of Valley theater were already over. At least you might get that impression from talking with some of the people who were around back then, when Hamp was...
Roadhouse Riot
For those who enjoy a few drinks and some observational humor, the Second Sunday Comedy Series, hosted by Dave Yubruh (pictured), may just fill the void. The Route 63 Roadhouse offers up a hefty dose of comedy, drinks and pub food each month when the club features at...
This Show's for Dummies
Until the 16th century, ventriloquism (called gastromancy by the ancient Greeks) was closely associated with necromancy: the art of "throwing" one's voice so that it appeared to be coming from another location was often used to make people believe they...
Question Reality
Interdisciplinary theater artist Djola Branner does not write plays. He creates what he refers to as "collage[s] of movement, text and melody." Branner co-founded the acclaimed Pomo Afro Homos (short for Postmodern African-American homosexuals), a prominent...From The Ashes…
In an effort to rebuild the Shantigar Foundation’s once-magnificent theater barn, foundation members present two stagings of foundation creator Jean-Claude van Itallie’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or How Not to Do It Again). A longtime practitioner of...
One Man Running
When Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner appeared on screens last year, the film captured the desperate, epic drama of the book with vast landscapes and a vibrant score. This week, Sorab Wadia (pictured) performs a new adaptation of The Kite Runner: a quiet,...
The Witching Hour
Shakespeare's Macbeth is so steeped in superstition with its witches, visions, apparitions and prophecies that many thespians have been known to refuse to call the play by its name in fear of invoking a curse, instead referring to it as "The Scottish...
Gypsy Opera
If an explosion of high romance is what you desire, where better to travel than 19th-century Spain? In Georges Bizet's most famous operatic work, Carmen, a gypsy woman stirs up passion and drama with her unapologetic and hedonistic embrace of life.Teatro Linco...
By the Book
Starting this week, I'll be writing about theater in these pages on a regular basis. As befits this paper, I consider myself an advocate for the theater—someone who loves the stage, respects and admires the work of the individuals and companies who tread the...
Transylvanian Tales
In Ted Tiller's adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the bulk of the action takes place at psychiatrist Dr. Seward's living quarters on the grounds of the Asylum for the Insane in 1930s England. At dinner one night the characters—Dr. Seward; Sybil,...Breaking the Language Barrier
It's called the actor's nightmare. You find yourself onstage in a play you don't know, playing a part you didn't realize you'd been cast in and don't know the lines for.The actors in The Golden Lotus might well have felt they were in a...
Resurrected and Brand New
Six black men—well, five men and a young boy—share the stage and interlocking lives in Daniel Beaty's Resurrection, the new play currently at Hartford Stage. Each of these sons of the 'hood is confronting the legacies of racism and poverty with...
To the Manor Borne
Oscar Wilde's short story The Canterville Ghost, written in 1887, is a parody that turns the tables on the classic ghost story. Sir Simon de Canterville, who died mysteriously in 1584, just loves scaring the bejesus out of people. But when the Otises, a thoroughly...
Love is Blind
The Leading Ladies (pictured) boast the status "the only outlet for musical theater on the Smith College campus," and are still going strong as they stage their 14th production this fall. Since 2002, they've put on such classics as Lucky Stiff and A...
An American Voice
A few years ago, as a dedicated listener to the NPR show This American Life, I experienced a giddy radio moment. Having procured my This American Life secret decoder ring, I awaited the voice of Fred Foy, Lone Ranger radio announcer. I unscrambled the secret message...
Soho Solo
Howard Zinn, the people's historian, also wrote a play called Marx in Soho. The play is a one-man appearance by the original communist, who's been given an hour and a half to come back from the dead to defend his ideas against those who corrupted and distorted...
Wow! That Isn't Bizarre
Many of us in the Valley theater community mourned the demise of StageWest 10 years ago, and many deplored the new artistic direction taken by its replacement, CityStage. Where StageWest maintained a repertory company for many years, mounted original productions and...
Two's Company
Three two-handers this week: a couple of elderly widowers looking back on their lifelong friendship; a Gothic spoof with two actors playing all the roles; an ancient epic retold in a collaboration between a storyteller and a musician. Let's begin with that last...
The Pros of Con
No one wants to be a sucker. And Hollywood is obsessed with the more deceitful and gutsy among us, those who would make us suckers.The live show Hoodwinked! arrives at Springfield's CityStage this week to demonstrate the art of the con. The show stars four...Lemon's Hood
Lemon is a star of hip-hop performance poetry. Like most of his colleagues on the spoken-word stage, he came up through the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and honed his craft in the poetry slam scene. He was a member of the hip-hop theater ensemble Universes when they premiered...
It's a Wonderful Play
Much like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Christmas Carol, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is a Christmas season must-see. This year, instead of just catching it on the boob tube, head down to West Springfield and watch...
Revelry and Devilry
'Tis the season. In the next few weeks, troupes all over the region will be rolling out their annual Christmas Carols and Nutcrackers. In Hartford, TheaterWorks is getting a jump on them all with The Seafarer, an unlikely bowl of Yuletide wassail from the most...
Les Invalides
In a time when access to healthcare is a pressing concern for many, it isn't out of place to wonder what we would do to get it. Moliere's play The Imaginary Invalid takes a comedic look at this question with a hypochondriac father who seeks to marry his...
A Menace to Society
It begins in 1963, with a woman bleeding to death in a hallway of Harlem Hospital, the victim of an attempted coat-hanger abortion. Bill Baird, a 31-year-old medical researcher, witnessed that horrible, unnecessary death. The experience, he now says, made him into an...
Literary Dance
Images associated with ballet—lithe, tutu-clad dancers and elaborate, evocative set design—are distinctly rooted in Romantic artistic traditions, and some of the world's most iconic ballets are derived from definitive Romantic texts (The Nutcracker was...
It's a Wonderful… Play?
A fixture of the holiday entertainment season is those perennial reruns of It's a Wonderful Life. The beloved movie has now found its way onto the stage, in not one but two quite different dramatizations. One of them fills the stage with 53 performers, and one...
Going Pro: Plusses and Pitfalls of the Equity Life
For stage actors, the standard demarcation between professional and amateur is membership in Actors' Equity Association. While you can be paid for acting without being in Equity—and in some cases vice versa—the union is the accepted mark of those who...Dancing Circles 'Round Ellen
Comedienne Suzanne Westernhoefer's first television appearance was on Sally, a talk show hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael, in 1991. She went on to become the first openly lesbian actress to appear on national TV with a performance on Late Night with David Letterman....Six Degrees
Although Kevin Bacon has been in an almost absurd number of movies—Mystic River, Hollow Man, The Woodsman, Wild Things, Sleepers, Murder in the First, Apollo 13, A Few Good Men, Flatliners and Tremors, to name a few—it's impossible to forget his...
StageStruck: A Valley Christmas Carol
"I think we're coming into a time when we need to rethink everything—the way we relate to each other, and the way we bring people together."That's Linda McInerney, director of a new production of that old favorite, A Christmas Carol, which...
Frozen Follies
Winter is at its height, the economy is in the gutter, and so are your spirits. It might be just the time to raise the latter with some truly silly entertainment. If so, a couple of musicals that opened last week could be just the ticket.Seeing Idols of the King at...
Pioneer Valley Stage: Local Pros
Conventional theater wisdom has it that you can only be a professional actor in New York or Los Angeles, or at least in a metropolis like Boston or Chicago. But if the mark of a professional is working regularly and getting paid for it, there are actors here in the...
Flannel Follies
Grab your flannel shirt, cultivate that five o'clock shadow and get to West Springfield for what promises to be "an unabashedly sparkling romp in the woods." Playwrights Fred Alley and James Kaplan (the minds behind the hit Guys on Ice) return to bring...
And the Statuette Goes To…
I saw 73 plays this year, and covered 30 of them in these pages and on WFCR Public Radio. I also directed five shows and performed in three. Call it a passion, call it an obsession, it's what I love. As the year draws down, I've enjoyed looking back over those...
Life in New York
In a country as big as the United States, the concept of nationalism can sometimes seem enormous, so it might be easier to resort to statism. Of course, the realities of being a Vermonter or a Bay Stater or a New Yorker are always far more complex than a pithy...
Art at the Crossroads
All of Andrea Hairston's plays are about the same thing. That's not a criticism. Over 30 years, her work with Chrysalis Theatre has formed an interconnected series of pieces that converge in recurring themes: violence, racism, women's strength, the...
Secrets and Lies
Dying City is one of those plays in which secrets and mysteries get unraveled bit by bit in high-octane confrontations and confessions. But at the end of Christopher Shinn's highly lauded play (a Pulitzer finalist last year), when all the plot threads were spun...
A Certain Escape
The Internet can do a lot for those who seek arcane knowledge. But if you'd like to spend a weekend munching a lightbulb or swallowing a sword, Dean of the Coney Island Sideshow School Todd Robbins is quite sure that's not the place to start. "You need...
Aftermath
Playwright Donna Jenson offers a highly personal look at sexual abuse of children with What She Knows, presented for the first time as a dramatic reading this week at Smith College. Jenson reads as the character Francie, and is accompanied by guitarist John Sheldon,...
Dead Man's Funhouse
For the first five minutes of Dead Man's Cell Phone, now playing at TheaterWorks in Hartford, we're way ahead of the heroine, Jean, as she dines alone in a caf?, because we know the play's title and she doesn't. So when the phone on the table next to...
I Got You, Abe
Those touched by President Obama's inauguration speech may find actor/playwright Michael Fox Kennedy's Even we here… (featuring Abraham Lincoln in a monologue) equally inspiring. With words culled directly from the 16th president's speeches, letters...
In the Name of Love
Those looking for something more than dinner and a movie this Valentine's Day can celebrate—and support local community service organizations—at The Amherst Club's annual charity event Love Notes. The event begins with a showcase of local talent,...
Of Coochie Snorchers and the “Good” Rape
From its not-so-humble beginnings in the mid-'90s as the Off-Broadway sensation that dared people to say its title, The Vagina Monologues has grown into a movement. Less than a play and more than just a piece of theater, this collection of first-person anecdotes,...
StageStruck: Classics Illustrated
Two classics this week—one the stage adaptation of a beloved American novel and its iconic film version, the other a classical tale that barely squeaks into the Shakespearean canon. Both productions, now playing on area stages, are interesting, instructive and,...
Crossroads
William Inge's 1955 play Bus Stop is perhaps best known as an award-winning film starring Marilyn Monroe. Directed by Keith Langsdale, the version staged at West Springfield's Majestic Theater aims to strip the play down to its basic elements and to let the...
StageStruck: Window on the Balkans
Milosevic at the Hague is half whimsical biography, half courtroom drama (complete with a table-turning climax) and half dreamplay that weaves together real and imagined events and personages. And no, that's not faulty arithmetic. This show really does add up to...
Turtle Tales
Everybody knows if you snooze you lose, and nobody agrees more than Aesop's lounging Hare when he wakes to find the steadfast Tortoise crossing the finish line. Now The Great Race of the Tortoise and the Hare has been set in an interactive and family-friendly...
Behind the Beat: Sea of Birds
Sebastienne Mundheim describes her new performance piece, Sea of Birds as a "fragile paper sculpture animated by dancers, a lyrical voice, a sonic landscape, live musicians, light and shadow play." Performed in and around a giant white dome covered in...
Van Farrier, 1959-2009
When I interviewed Van Farrier late last year for a two-part Advocate article about professional actors living in the Valley ("Pioneer Valley Stage: Local Pros," Jan. 1 and "Going Pro: Plusses and Pitfalls of the Equity Life," Jan. 8, 2009), he was...
StageStruck: When Is an Opera Not an Opera?
Every season, Commonwealth Opera of Western Massachusetts stages an opera and a musical—the former because that's where their heart and history are, the latter for fun, variety and ticket sales. But this year the company's spring production, which plays...
StageStruck: Garden Party
Double Edge Theatre differs from most other performing companies in several ways. One, of course, is the location. They live and work together on a 100-acre farm in Ashfield, where the stage is a not-very-converted barn. In the summer, performances spill out over the...
Origins
Ever wonder how the camel got his hump? Or how the rhinoceros got his skin? How about how the leopard got his spots? Tales of this type, sometimes known as origin stories or "pourquoi stories," answer the questions of why things are the way they are, or,...
Kick Out the Jams
Thaw yourself from winter's chill with a springtime performance featuring dancers from 10 local dance companies, including East Street Ballet, Pioneer Valley Ballet, Academy of Ballet Arts, Northampton School of Dance and others. The performance, called Just for...
Stella and Beryl
After the old Amherst movie house closed its doors 10 years ago, the civic group that revived it intended to create an arts center in which films would share the space with live performance. For various reasons, that didn't happen, but this week live theater comes...
StageStruck: The Magic Knife
The Ordinary Theater is no ordinary theater. What fascinates its founder and director, Mitchell Polin, isn't linear narrative but the thrill of capturing the "simultaneity of action" that surrounds us every day. "We're at our computer and three...
Falsettos in Northampton
With the aid of the arts councils of Amherst and Northampton and other sponsors, Easthampton's PACE hits the stage in Northampton this week with Falsettos, a pairing of two Tony Award-winning one-act Broadway musicals about a raft of interesting characters: a gay...
G-String Circus
Hold your breath, pucker your lips, and prepare for some sparkling, shimmying show girl and bad boy fun in FUSE, a circus of drag and burlesque. Curated, produced, and presented by Colleen McKeown, this acrobatic spectacle combines the talents of performers and...
Stage Struck: …And a River Runs Through It
An epigraph in the script of …And Jesus Moonwalks on the Mississippi is a quote from the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca: "A play is a poem standing up." Marcus Gardley's play is indeed a poem—much of its dialogue is in sinewy...Stage Struck: Fire and Water
In Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, firemen don't put out fires, they start them. The tools of their trade aren't hoses but flamethrowers. In this dystopian future, Americans have become so dumbed-down by material gratification and passive media...E-Edition
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