Stage
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 29, 2009 | Stage
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...
by James Heflin | Feb 5, 2009 | Stage
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...
by James Heflin | Feb 5, 2009 | Stage
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,...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 12, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Tom Sturm | Feb 12, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Alyssa King | Feb 19, 2009 | Stage
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,...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 26, 2009 | Stage
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,...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 5, 2009 | Stage
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,...
by Ryan Duffy | Mar 5, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 5, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Fraylie Nord | Mar 12, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Mark Roessler | Mar 12, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 17, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 17, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 26, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Tom Sturm | Mar 26, 2009 | Stage
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,...
by Ryan Duffy | Apr 2, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 16, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 23, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Advocate staff | Apr 30, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Fraylie Nord | Apr 30, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Chris Rohmann | May 7, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Chris Rohmann | May 7, 2009 | Stage
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...
by Alyssa King | May 14, 2009 | Stage
Since his death in 1989, Alvin Ailey's vision of modern dance has continued to flourish in the hands of Judith Jamison and the incredible dancers of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. This year, the company celebrates its 50th anniversary with a tour that is...
by Alyssa King | May 21, 2009 | Stage
The Sandglass Theater, an award-winning theater company specializing in combining music and theater with puppetry, continues its Voices of Community series this weekend with Caterpillar Soup. Written and performed by Lyena Strelkoff, it recounts her experiences trying...
by Alyssa King | May 28, 2009 | Stage
Masters of satire and mockery, bouffons were the jesters of the French Renaissance. Normally marginalized as ugly, disfigured or mad, through performance they regained the upper hand, ridiculing their audiences to entertain. Award-winning performer Eric Davis revives...
by Tom Sturm | Jun 4, 2009 | Stage
As long as bankers and brokers have had the ability to play with other people's money, they've also had among them a few scoundrels whose definition of "play" was a bit more fast and loose than the average. Such is the life of one Mr. Voysey,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 11, 2009 | Stage
Isn't it funny how often the patriotic notion that our troops are fighting overseas to defend our constitutional liberties, bumps up against attempts to stifle those freedoms at home? That's the ironic back-story to Voices in Conflict, a theatrical collage of...
by James Heflin | Jun 11, 2009 | Stage
Ever heard of Gormlaith? That's not a monster in the Beowulf mold, or some ancient villain—Gormlaith was in fact the wife of one of the most famous men in Irish history, High King of Ireland Brian Boru, whose harp still graces Irish money. In The Last High...
by Michael Cimaomo | Jun 11, 2009 | Stage
From its humble beginnings in a nightclub on New York's Upper West Side to its current reign as the city's longest-running musical comedy revue, Forbidden Broadway has left audiences rolling in the aisles since 1982. The production of the Tony Award-winning...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 17, 2009 | Stage
Ah, summer! The season of long evenings spent… sitting indoors in the dark. While most normal people are stirring the charcoal in the warm dusk, and even discriminating theatergoers are selecting just one or two shows a week from the summer theater cornucopia,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 18, 2009 | Stage
I fully expected to headline this article “A Brolly Good Time.” Outdoor theater, in the spring, in England? I must have been mad to plan a theater-going trip around that quixotic notion. But instead, I was outrageously lucky. The sun shone out of a...
by Jennifer Burwell | Jun 25, 2009 | Stage
These girls just want to have fun, but they also cry and sing. Part chick flick and all girl-power, Girls' Night: The Musical is the story of five female 30-something friends on a girls' night out at a karaoke bar. First produced in 2000 at a community...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 30, 2009 | Stage
Both Freud's Last Session, at Barrington Stage Company's Stage 2, and Faith Healer, in the Berkshire Theatre Festival's Unicorn Theatre, bore into questions of truth and illusion, faith and fraud. One takes the form of a dialogue between two rationalists...
by Michael Cimaomo | Jun 30, 2009 | Stage
Break out your blankets; it's time for some theatre in the great outdoors. To kick off its 2009 season of Shakespeare Under the Stars, the Hampshire Shakespeare Company proudly presents one of the Bard's most enduring plays: Henry IV, Part 1. Even though it is...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 27, 2009 | Stage
Sixteen-year-old Allie and her 11-year-old brother Cal have run away from their abusive father. They hole up in an Appalachian shack, where Allie does her best to be his mother too, and Cal feeds them both with fish from the mountain stream. The Catch explores...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 16, 2009 | Stage
In this summer of economic discontent, more theaters are turning to the time-tested ingredients of summer stock: comedies and musicals. I'll be covering a clutch of laff-vehicles next week, but first, three pieces of musical theater that couldn't be more...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 10, 2009 | Stage
Shakespeare's rough-and-tumble comedy The Taming of the Shrew gets a workout in Look Park's Pines Theater this weekend—and so does the cast in the Valley's newest theatrical ensemble, the August Company. Eight actors play all the roles, doubling up...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 16, 2009 | Stage
One pits small-town values against big-city greed. The other takes an almost Freudian view of religious fundamentalism. One is a comedy with a cynical stone in its sentimental heart, the other a hard-edged drama of ideas with a rather soft-centered message.Both of...
by James Heflin | Sep 17, 2009 | Stage
The purveyors of puppety goodness join forces with Northampton's Primate Fiasco, a band of Dixieland proclivities and circus-like abandon. The event is dubbed The Happy Pill Circus, and promises to be a theatrical good time of rare dimension.It's sponsored by...
by Rachel Holliday | Jul 16, 2009 | Stage
If the kids are getting restless in July, take them to see an interactive performance of Winnie-the-Pooh at the Paintbox Theatre in Northampton. Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger will be there, led by local storyteller Tom McCabe as A.A. Milne, author of the Pooh tales....
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 24, 2009 | Stage
Arthur Miller is considered by many to be America's Greatest Playwright, with only Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams the other obvious contenders for the crown. Interestingly, all three were prolific dramatists but their reputations are founded on less...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 16, 2009 | Stage
During the intermission of Dividing the Estate, my companion said, "Does this take place in the '50s?" No, it's 1987, but the small Texas town it's set in seems frozen in time, and Horton Foote's script feels like it was written 50 years ago....
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 1, 2009 | Stage
The opening scene of The Porch is one of the out-and-out funniest and most perfectly formed comic set pieces I've ever seen: three elderly ladies sitting on wicker chairs, two of them trying to explain to the other, without getting too graphic, exactly what it was...
by Jeremy Gardner | Jul 23, 2009 | Stage
Hampshire Shakespeare Company presents an adaptation of Shakespeare's wild romantic comedy Twelfth Night this week. Set in the Caribbean in the 1930s, the company's version of the classic tale brings a Latin twist to one of the Bard's most accessible...
by Michael Cimaomo | Oct 8, 2009 | Stage
For those who like their medieval plays with a dash of craziness, the Renaissance Theater Company proudly presents Francis Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle as their first production of the school year. This groundbreaking 17th-century satire is more Monty...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 30, 2009 | Stage
This summer, Shakespeare & Company are staging more actual Shakespeares than usual, including all three of the mainstage productions and one in the new Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre that's usually home to contemporary work. Now playing are two of the great...
by James Heflin | Oct 8, 2009 | Stage
Two UMass alumnae, Irada Djelassi and Katherine Hooper, come to town this week with the dance troupe they co-direct, BoSoma—Boston Somatic Dance Company. Four other alumnae dance with the troupe. The co-directors also present a lecture on starting a non-profit...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 30, 2009 | Stage
"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Those famous last words, variously attributed to a number of great actors, are famous because every performer knows they're true. It's all, as they say, in the timing. The throwaway quip, the perfectly placed punch...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 15, 2009 | Stage
Harrison, Texas, is a fictional small town that playwright Horton Foote superimposed over his real-life hometown of Wharton. Many of his plays are set in "Harrison," and he developed almost a repertory company of characters who show up in various works. All...
by Rachel Cummings | Aug 6, 2009 | Stage
New Century Theatre presents Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, a play of love, lust and academia set in an English country house during both the 19th century and the present. July 30-Aug. 8: Sun.-Thu., 7:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m., $14-28, New Century Theatre, Theatre 14,...
by Michael Cimaomo | Oct 22, 2009 | Stage
What if Pablo Picasso met Albert Einstein at a bohemian Parisian nightspot on the same night it was visited by a time-traveling rock star on a mission? This is just one of the many zany questions raised in comedian Steve Martin's most popular play, Picasso at the...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 6, 2009 | Stage
"If you had an hour to speak to the world, what would you want to say?"That question, posed to participants in the Springfield-based youth program First Generation, was one of the sparking points for their creation of a theater piece based on their life...
by Michael Cimaomo | Oct 22, 2009 | Stage
Since 1995, one area comedy troupe has satisfied the Pioneer Valley's appetite for dinner with a side of sleuthing. Back by popular demand, The Comical Mystery Dinner Theater returns to the Skinner mansion for another presentation of their "new...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 6, 2009 | Stage
One of the thrills of summer theater, for actors and audience alike, is its pressure-cooker schedule. The rehearsal period for each show is usually less than two weeks, challenging the actors to put together convincing performances without the luxury of extended...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 29, 2009 | Stage
In these even-tougher times for the arts, the one-person play is enjoying an enforced resurgence. Shakespeare & Company mounted three of them this year, Amherst's Ko Festival formed its whole summer season around solo shows, and now the Berkshire Theatre...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 13, 2009 | Stage
Two companies situated on the fringes of the Berkshires invite adventurous playgoers to step outside the comfort zones of the region's major summer theaters. Both Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield and the Berkshire Fringe in Great Barrington specialize in original...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 29, 2009 | Stage
The stars are aligning for those "star-crossed lovers," as three separate versions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet hit the stage in the coming weeks.Each production comes to the classic romance from a different perspective. A touring company captures...
by Advocate Staff | Aug 13, 2009 | Stage
After all these years, Grease is still the word. The beloved rock musical returns to the stage courtesy of the New England Youth Theatre of Brattleboro. Aug. 6-7, 7:30 p.m., August 8-9, 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., $7.50/ students, $9.50/ seniors, $11.50/ general, New...
by Jillian Fink | Nov 5, 2009 | Stage
Young@Heart, the well-known troupe of elderly choral singers, makes its way back home for a local performance at Mount Holyoke College after another seaon of globetrotting.Born in 1982 in a Northampton housing facility, The Young@Heart Chorus has become famous,...
