Stage
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 4, 2010 | Stage
This is a big year for playwright/poet/teacher/activist Magdalena Gomez, who has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors in the past few months. For example: Teatro V!da, the Springfield-based youth theater company she founded, was named 2010 Outstanding Arts...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 4, 2010 | Stage
In this time of economic uncertainty, when a lot of theaters are sticking with the tried and true, Chester Theatre Company is going for something untried and new for them. Three-quarters of the company’s four-play season will be given to Arlene Hutton’s...
by Mark Roessler | Jun 10, 2010 | Stage
In the center of a paved cul-de-sac, in the middle of an otherwise empty field, stood a woman, statue-still, absorbing the fading evening light. She wore a magnificent hoop skirt that looked from a distance to be made of rose petals. Her arms were frozen in the air. A...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 10, 2010 | Stage
I’m not a native New Englander, but I’ve been a Red Sox fan long enough to have had my heart broken in 1986, when an impossible series of errors cost them the World Series and for many fans confirmed, yet again, the intractability of The Curse. The...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 17, 2010 | Stage
I had just finished E.L. Doctorow’s epic novel The March, which traces Sherman’s bloody campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas that ended the Civil War, when I caught up last weekend with The Whipping Man. The play, which opens the summer season at...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 18, 2010 | Stage
Stephen Sondheim is unquestionably the most influential figure in musical theater of the last half-century. His acerbic lyrics, angular melodies and world-weary themes have changed the personality of the Broadway show. Outside the rock musical and Lloyd Webber...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 24, 2010 | Stage
The Hampshire Shakespeare Company is beset by problems this summer. The notorious misogyny of the season’s opening show, The Taming of the Shrew, creates a problem for any director. Shakespeare’s predominantly male dramatis personae present a perennial...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 1, 2010 | Stage
Two fall-out-of-your-seat-laughing British comedies kick off summer in the Valley. New Century Theatre opens its 20th anniversary season with a revival of one of its all-time hits, Noises Off. And the Royal National Theatre’s production of the 19th-century sex...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 8, 2010 | Stage
Four major theaters anchor the Berkshire summer season: the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Pittsfield’s Barrington Stage Company and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. I’ve been covering their shows for a...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 8, 2010 | Stage
David Mamet’s territory is the burned-out shell of the soul. His best-known plays and films are peopled with losers clinging to pathetic illusions, spitting out their bitterness in the elliptical, fragmented language that has come to be known as Mametspeak. The...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 15, 2010 | Stage
The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is one of the great tragic love stories, as much a part of our collective unconscious as Romeo and Juliet’s. Lovers so deeply connected that when she dies, he follows her to the Underworld and sings his plea so beautifully...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 15, 2010 | Stage
Kate Maguire is in her 17th season as artistic director of the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge. (See also “Theater That Matters” in this issue.) BTF is one of the oldest summer theaters in the country, established in 1928 in a jewel-box playhouse...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 22, 2010 | Stage
Stretching. I’m stretching out unused muscles and ligaments with about 30 other people on a drizzly afternoon in Ashfield. There are a few other grayhairs in the room, but most of the bodies ranged across the floor in T-shirts, sweats and bare feet are young and...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 22, 2010 | Stage
“The more problems you’ve got, the more fun you have. The audience loves seeing the problems and how we solve them.” Director Kevin Coleman is in a circle with four young men, discussing a scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in which...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 29, 2010 | Stage
By some measures, Williamstown Theatre Festival, the northern anchor of the Berkshires’ summer arts scene, is twice as big an operation as its sister theaters, Shakespeare & Company, Barrington Stage Company and Berkshire Theatre Festival. Much of this is...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 29, 2010 | Stage
The first two weekends of this year’s Ko Festival of Performance demonstrated the scope of this summer carnival of theater that defies and redefines convention. A solo performer recounted a dozen real-life stories; a six-person ensemble enacted a single...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 5, 2010 | Stage
Hampshire Shakespeare Company opened its season last month with a tight, taut Hamlet that featured a thrilling, pyrotechnic performance in the title role. PJ Adzima is still in high school, but he brought not only an adolescent vigor that made the prince’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 12, 2010 | Stage
“I wanted to make this a working person’s theater,” says Julianne Boyd, artistic director of Barrington Stage Company. She’s showing me around the company’s mainstage theater on Union Street in Pittsfield. The company’s move here...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 26, 2010 | Stage
Shakespeare & Company isn’t only about Shakespeare, but the contemporary plays that comprise nearly half of this summer’s program share some common ground with the Bard. They are smaller works than Shakespeare’s sprawling masterpieces—of...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 12, 2010 | Stage
Arlene Hutton’s Nibroc Trilogy begins with one of the sweetest and funniest courtship scenes in contemporary drama. Two young people meet on a cross-country train at the beginning of World War II. Raleigh is a talker and a teaser, May shy and proper, and...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 2, 2010 | Stage
The plays of Alan Ayckbourn, England’s master farceur, are models of comedic structure, crafted from everyday situations that get hilariously out of hand. His trademark is structural gimmicks that play with space and/or time. Absurd Person Singular (a title...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 19, 2010 | Stage
The Berkshire Fringe’s name reflects both its geographical and artistic relationships to the area’s other summer theater festivals. It’s tucked into the southwestern corner of the state—though its host community, Great Barrington, has good...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 9, 2010 | Stage
The set tells us a lot. R. Michael Miller’s design for the Berkshire Theatre Company production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance is an oh-so-typical prosperous suburban living room, with elegant furniture, orderly bookshelves and a well-stocked and...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 9, 2010 | Stage
“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date,” quoth the poet. But its brief harvest sure is bountiful. In the three-month feast of performance just ended, 15 theater companies in the Valley and Berkshires mounted some 60 productions in 23 indoor and...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 16, 2010 | Stage
In The Arabian Nights, Princess Scheherazade subverts a debauched king’s nightly ritual of rape and murder by telling him stories. As Mark Vecchio interprets the tale, “The kingdom was becoming a wasteland, nothing had any meaning anymore. Her storytelling...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 16, 2010 | Stage
Before the audience are even all seated, a burly, bearded man in dirty fatigues shuffles onstage, unrolls a sleeping bag, lies down and wearily closes his eyes. He’s soon disturbed by a scruffy street musician who plugs his Stratocaster into a rolling amp and...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 23, 2010 | Stage
“Every time we do the festival, we think, ‘That’s it, we don’t have to do it again.’ But there’s just so much good work out there, it’s irresistible. We have to present it.” That’s Eric Bass, co-founder/director of...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 30, 2010 | Stage
“It’s much too dark.” “It’s repetitive and boring.” “This is not entertainment.” The scene was the Theater Project’s rehearsal studio in West Springfield. The occasion was a series of staged readings of new plays....
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 7, 2010 | Stage
I grew up in the small college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a world of woods, cornfields—and Shakespeare. Every summer for six glorious years, Antioch College mounted a Shakespeare festival led by Arthur Lithgow, an Antioch professor and consummate man of the...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 14, 2010 | Stage
When director Julianne Boyd starting doing research for her production of The Crucible, which plays this month at Barrington Stage Company, she went to the source. Arthur Miller’s most-performed play (another production opens next weekend at the New England...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 21, 2010 | Stage
In the myth of Persephone, the daughter of the harvest goddess is raped by the lord of the Underworld and taken down to his dark domain. Though she is ultimately released, he still has power over her and she must return to his realm for half of every year. That story...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 21, 2010 | Stage
Glorious summer has turned to yellow autumn (to mangle the Bard), but the lights are still on at three of the Berkshires’ summer theaters. The Crucible opened last week at Barrington Stage Company (see StageStruck, October 7, 2010) on the heels of ongoing...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 28, 2010 | Stage
If the name Hallie Flanagan rings any bells in the Valley, it’s probably because the black-box theater at Smith College is named for her. She was chair of Smith’s theater department in the 1940s and ’50s, and the marquee credit honors her service not...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 4, 2010 | Stage
A funereal air hangs over the opening scenes of two plays being performed on area campuses this weekend. Thing is, the one that takes place in an actual funeral parlor is a caustic comedy. The other one, set in a home that might as well be a cloister, begins in the...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 11, 2010 | Stage
Jessica Litwak says she loves New York, but recently moved to the Valley because “I wanted more of a collaborative community feeling. I fell in love with this area and felt I could grow old in a cultural, intellectual, left-wing artistic community.” Litwak...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 18, 2010 | Stage
When actors are preparing to play a role, they often dig into the character’s “back story”—the life history that brought that person to the moment s/he appears on the stage. The playwright often provides at least some of it in the script, but...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 18, 2010 | Stage
“As a theater professional, I want to create theater that people can come and see, but I also want to be taking action to improve the real lives of women and girls around the world.” So says Kristen van Ginhoven, co-founder, with actor/educator Leigh...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 25, 2010 | Stage
You’ve been caught shoplifting. A cop has cuffed you and the angry shopkeeper is in your face. Next stop, a courtroom and a criminal record. You’re under arrest for driving drunk, and not for the first time. You didn’t run anyone...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 2, 2010 | Stage
Enchanted Circle Theater, the Holyoke-based educational theater company, performed its latest play recently in the Roxbury section of Boston. “It was a love fest,” reports Priscilla Kane Hellweg, the troupe’s artistic director. The mostly...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 2, 2010 | Stage
TheaterWorks, which calls itself “Hartford’s Off-Broadway,” celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. Over a quarter century, this little arts engine that could has made its basement theater an essential venue and transformed the historic Art Deco...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 9, 2010 | Stage
The weekend before Thanksgiving, the seventh edition of the 24-Hour Theater Project was staged in Northampton. In the space of one day, six plays were written, rehearsed and performed. The Advocate’s theater critic, Chris Rohmann, was one of the directors....
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 16, 2010 | Stage
Tony Simotes was just getting comfortable in the artistic director’s chair at Shakespeare & Company when he found himself flat on his back. An on-and-off company member since the troupe’s founding in 1978 (there’s a picture of him as a young...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 16, 2010 | Stage
A whirligig is a spinning top, pinwheel or other whirling device, revolving madly in a repetitive cycle. The term has become an idiom for giddy motion: a merry-go-round, the social whirl or, as Shakespeare put it, “the whirligig of time [that] brings in his...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 23, 2010 | Stage
“In the theater, it’s all about timing, isn’t it?” Kate Maguire is commenting on the concatenation of circumstances that doubled her job description last month. Until then, she was wearing two hats: artistic director and CEO of the Berkshire...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 30, 2010 | Stage
This year, I’ve seen over 100 plays by over 100 playwrights living and dead, conventional and experimental, brilliant and not-so. One dramatist has grabbed my attention more than any other, and not only because more of her plays have been performed around here...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 30, 2010 | Stage
The other night I had the pleasure of dining out with three accomplished women of the Valley’s theater community: Jeannine Haas, artistic director of Pauline Productions, Linda McInerney, artistic director of Old Deerfield Productions, and Linda Putnam, a widely...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 3, 2011 | Stage
This year, Valley theaters took even more than their usual quota of risks, staging adventurous pieces in provocative ways and, in many cases, unusual places. Herewith, a dozen shows that tested limits, challenged expectations—and surprisingly often, came in...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 10, 2011 | Stage
As Hamlet lies dying in Horatio’s arms, he implores his friend to “absent thee from felicity a while, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.” That dying wish, uttered at the end of Shakespeare’s play, inspired Zak...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 17, 2011 | Stage
The scene: a TV studio, home of “a hot new youth-oriented Moscow television production company.” Through a window, the interior of a caf? across the street is visible. In the studio, six young media professionals work, chat and flirt. They are contemporary...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 24, 2011 | Stage
“We should auction off backstage passes for this show so people can watch what’s going on behind the scenes,” Kara Midlam joked. She’s the costume designer for Shakespeare & Company’s current production, The Mystery of Irma Vep, a...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 24, 2011 | Stage
Two crime stories take the stage next week at area colleges. Both are new works by student playwrights who are interested in the nature of guilt and the mechanisms of deceit. Neither play is a whodunit; one is not even a whydunit. One looks back to the early 1960s, a...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 3, 2011 | Stage
It may seem odd that the UMass Theater Department’s next mainstage production is based on a Japanese children’s book. But Night on the Galactic Railroad isn’t children’s theater. Its author, Kenji Miyazawa, who died in 1933, is Japan’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 10, 2011 | Stage
An irony frequently recalled in theater circles is that Anton Chekhov called his bleak portraits of isolation, disappointment and despair “comedies.” It’s true that a kind of rueful half-smile plays at the edges of his major dramas—Uncle Vanya,...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 18, 2011 | Stage
As reactionaries in Congress contemplate savage cuts to arts and culture funding, and foundations continue to reel from the hit their endowments took in the Great Recession, small arts organizations are worrying more than ever about staying afloat. So it’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 7, 2011 | Stage
The plays that Andrea Hairston writes and produces with Northampton’s Chrysalis Theater persistently confront big, enduring issues: violence, racism, the trials and triumphs of women, the importance of community, the power of art. Those themes course through her...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 10, 2011 | Stage
“In nature, nothing exists alone,” wrote Rachel Carson in The Silent Spring, the 1962 best-seller often credited with launching the environmental movement. The idea that events, natural and unnatural, have overlapping, interrelated consequences is behind a...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 24, 2011 | Stage
WFCR Public Radio interrupted its programming on May 29 to relate, in stunned cadences, the incomprehensible news that Bob Paquette had died. After surviving lymphatic cancer, followed by an unrelated persistent infection, he was taken suddenly and paradoxically by an...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 30, 2011 | Stage
Two landmarks of the golden age of Broadway musicals are currently on stage in the region. One is probably the most perfectly constructed and unerringly tuneful musical comedy ever. The other is a cheeky homage to probably the most beloved, heart-warming (insert your...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 7, 2011 | Stage
“I walked in, and it was like Cirque de Soleil meets Parris Island boot camp.” It was filmmaker Julie Akeret’s first glimpse of Double Edge Theatre’s grueling actor-training process. “They’re climbing up ropes and running around,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 14, 2011 | Stage
“I think this is the first time all four of a season’s directors have been together under one roof.” The speaker is Byam Stevens, artistic director of the Chester Theatre Company, and the roof sheltering this unprecedented gathering is that of the...
