Stage
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 14, 2011 | Stage
In late 2009, Tony Simotes took over Shakespeare & Company’s artistic directorship from its founder and guiding spirit, Tina Packer, who wanted to spend less time behind the scenes and more on stage. But no sooner had Simotes taken the reins and set about...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 20, 2011 | Stage
Star power drives both current offerings at Williamstown Theatre Festival. This is nothing new. The festival has always attracted big names, many of whom served their apprenticeships here. But the new artistic director, Jenny Gerston, who also came of age at WTF, told...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 21, 2011 | Stage
Monday. Kali Quinn is standing alone on a stage bathed in harsh work lights, surrounded by an intriguing assortment of props and fixtures: a pile of suitcases, an antique ironing board, a clothesline and, downstage left, a mini sound system and a violin. We’re...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 28, 2011 | Stage
If you visit Double Edge Theatre at its Ashfield farm in the next month, the first thing you’ll notice is a sea of sails. Sprouting from a grassy platform, a fleet of sails billow on 25-foot masts, representing the 10-year voyage related in Homer’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 28, 2011 | Stage
I imagine every married couple and every divorce in the audience takes at least a moment during Dinner with Friends to reflect on their own situation. Donald Margulies’ drama investigates the breakup of a marriage—specifically, the shocks and aftershocks...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 4, 2011 | Stage
By now, nearly all of the 10 productions on Shakespeare & Company’s summer schedule have opened. Most will be running in repertory until Labor Day. I’ve seen half of them so far, including one that has now closed. That was Women of Will, Tina...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 11, 2011 | Stage
“I think there’s something inside us, every one of us, that freezes up when we see anyone different. It’s like a gate that slams down so we can feel safe behind it.” Two world-premiere plays in the Berkshires this week grasp both sides of that...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 18, 2011 | Stage
First there was a small woman, alone on the bare stage, relating a horrifying story of epic proportions that seemed to fill the dark echoing space. Then a couple of guys cramped inside a five-foot Plexiglas cube delivered a zany, rapid-fire evisceration of the art of...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 25, 2011 | Stage
Two women-led companies are performing this month in unlikely but appropriate venues. The Berkshire Actors Theatre makes its debut, on a claustrophobic little stage above the Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield, with a farce about the incestuous world of Hollywood...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 1, 2011 | Stage
“Theater is not dead; it is the definition of alive. In these days when you can’t even get a real person on the phone to place a complaint with the electric company, what a luxury to have living breathing humans in front of you, fervently believing in a...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 1, 2011 | Stage
All four summer theater shows I caught last week begin with a defining sound: a musical motif, a ship’s horn, a laugh, a hammer on nail. Each one, heard before the lights even come up, gives us an aural clue to what we can expect of the play’s style and...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 15, 2011 | Stage
The play has just ended. It was good—talented actors in a convincing production of an engaging script. It wasn’t the most hilarious, moving, stimulating or groundbreaking show you’ve seen this year, but it was solid and enjoyable, and you’re...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 22, 2011 | Stage
It’s coincidental, but entirely appropriate, that the Theater Project opened its 15th anniversary season at the Majestic Theater last week on the day after what would have been Buddy Holly’s 75th birthday. Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story is the show that...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 29, 2011 | Stage
Garrison Keillor tells a story from the early days of television, when flickering black-and-white images were luring audiences away from audio-only radio drama. A young boy, asked which he preferred, radio or TV, answered without hesitation, “Radio. Because the...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 22, 2011 | Stage
I was initially struck by the juxtaposition: a Greek tragedy—and a rather obscure one, at that—performed by students at a community college that I didn’t even know had a theater program. Then, when I saw Euripides’ The Bacchae last weekend at...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 6, 2011 | Stage
At the end of August, Flat Street in downtown Brattleboro became a free-flowing river as tributaries of the Connecticut, whipped up by Hurricane Irene, ruptured their banks. The New England Youth Theatre, one of the businesses affected by the flood, is “still...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 29, 2011 | Stage
I’ve been thinking recently about cross-gender casting. It came up again last weekend in Cymbeline at Shakespeare & Company, where 17 of the play’s 23 male roles were played by women. This was more a matter of necessity than an artistic choice. The...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 13, 2011 | Stage
Matt, the title character in Birthday Boy, is turning 40, a milestone that, as far as I could tell, every member of last Friday’s audience had long since left behind. The discrepancy made me think, and not for the first time, about the generational divide that...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 5, 2012 | Stage
I’ve seen 150 plays this year, and fully a tenth of them were by one playwright: Anton Chekhov. This is the guy Ira Gershwin was thinking of when he penned the lyric “With love to lead the way/ I’ve found more skies of gray/ than any Russian play/...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 20, 2011 | Stage
After a few weeks spent getting up to speed—auditions, rehearsals, juggling student schedules, all that backstage stuff—four of the Five Colleges’ fall theater seasons are poised to open. Over the next three weekends, we’re in for an absurdist...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 12, 2012 | Stage
People in the dark watching people in the light. Performers enacting a private reality while drawing their energy from the auditorium’s collective breath. The mysterious compact between actors and audiences, a shared understanding that without each other we...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 27, 2011 | Stage
In his 1933 memoir Down and Out in Paris and London, middle-class, Eton-educated George Orwell related his experiences living hand to mouth at the bottom of the social and economic heap. Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 account of living among...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 19, 2012 | Stage
It’s the second week of January and I haven’t seen a single play so far this year. How am I going to feed my 100-shows-a-year habit at this rate? After the holiday season, or even before, theaters go into hibernation before re-emerging in the new year...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 24, 2011 | Stage
You quite possibly read it here first: the full unexpurgated title of the latest play to tie The Paper of Record in knots, the play that’s currently receiving its American regional premiere in Hartford. When it was on Broadway last season, the New York Times and...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 16, 2012 | Stage
There is a house in New Orleans they call the Blind Pig’s Sty. And there is a penthouse in Gay Paree… which has nothing in common with that other house—except there’s presumably lots of offstage sex in both. What ties the two together,...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 1, 2011 | Stage
The bumper sticker reads “We still say Merry Christmas,” in defiance of the season’s “Happy Holidays” generalization. Yuletide has irretrievably become a secular season in which the most popular non-liturgical celebrations and...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 27, 2011 | Stage
The Amherst town seal pairs images of a plow and a book, reflecting the town’s parallel agricultural and academic history. A new soap opera serial with a local slant plays with both of those identities, but takes its title from the town’s joky, unofficial...
by Advocate Staff | Feb 23, 2012 | Stage
In the performance and discussion Decoding Our Past: Spirituals and the Underground Railroad, Christine Clemmons-McCune offers a look at the tradition of the spiritual. Feb. 25, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., Bing Arts Center, 716 Sumner Avenue, Springfield, (413) 731-9730.
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 26, 2012 | Stage
A year ago I did a count of plays produced by Western Massachusetts professional theaters to see how many of their productions in the previous year were written by women. The results were not pretty: 39 plays by men (not even counting those by Shakespeare), 13 by...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 8, 2011 | Stage
There’s a seminar this Sunday at the Yiddish Book Center titled “Is Got fun Nekome (God of Vengeance) a Queer Play?” It’s part of the free one-day Queer Jews and Allies Conference on the Hampshire College campus, and coincides with a student...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 23, 2012 | Stage
“Shakespeare & Company was based on a production of The Learned Ladies,” said Tina Packer. This historical tidbit was surprising because, of course, the company was founded on and is primarily dedicated to the works of the guy it’s named after,...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 15, 2011 | Stage
“Okay, now do it like an angry owl.” Scott Braidman is staging publicity photos for Santacide. In this one, the character Holly, an angry teenager, is leaping over the living room couch during an adolescent tantrum. She’s no ordinary teen, though....
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 3, 2011 | Stage
One day last month, Kyle Kate Dudley had a meeting with the vice president of a large Springfield corporation. She was there in her new role as managing director of the Drama Studio, the Springfield youth theater and conservatory, pitching an idea for expanding the...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 2, 2012 | Stage
I’m sure Irish families are no more dysfunctional than others, but a pair of domestic tragedies that opened locally last weekend, in coincidental tandem, might send the message that they are. Both Eugene O’Neill’s towering classic Long Day’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 2, 2012 | Stage
One man traced an epic wandering journey from eastern Europe to northern Britain. Another occupied a quiet corner of this country till events catapulted him into the headlines. Next week, campus theater departments bring both men’s adventures to Valley...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 15, 2011 | Stage
What do David Sedaris, Hedda Gabler and Mikhail Bulgakov have in common? Not a lot, I’ll admit. But in this week’s docket of performances I found a common thread in the situations faced by Sedaris, the sardonic diarist of life as a Macy’s elf; Hedda,...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 2, 2012 | Stage
Is it coincidence, or evidence of a cultural moment, that three of the films up for Best Picture Oscars on Sunday are about the silent movie era? I’m tempted to assume the latter, that our recurrent need to dip into the sweet pool of nostalgia is currently...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 10, 2011 | Stage
Not everyone who gets a dose of sodium pentothal—the infamous “truth serum”—as the first stage of preoperative anesthesia has a reaction like Deb Margolin’s. Instead of drifting into a dreamy twilight prior to losing consciousness, the...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 9, 2012 | Stage
It’s not every day the composer of the Broadway musical you’re preparing for a college production shows up at your rehearsals. But that’s what happened for the cast of Urinetown the week before it opened at UMass. Mark Hollmann spent several days in...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 9, 2012 | Stage
“I used to be a mathematician. I went to graduate school at M.I.T. And, please, before you get too impressed by that, just notice what I’m doing with my life now.” That disarming line opens Gioia De Cari’s solo show Truth Values. An actor,...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 9, 2012 | Stage
Five College Dance in Concert features work by Monica Bill Barnes, Diane Coburn-Brunning, Cathy Nicoli, Thomas Vacanti and Wendy Woodson. March 1-3, 8-10 p.m. $10, Kirby Theater, Amherst College, Amherst, (413) 538-2848.
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 17, 2011 | Stage
Two current comedies focus on women’s interactions, one revolving around prickly family connections, the other an anarchic interface with a man’s world. In Pittsfield, a theater dedicated to supporting women’s causes presents a seriocomic dissection...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 16, 2012 | Stage
Bertold Brecht’s masterpiece Mother Courage, about a woman who pulls a canteen wagon on the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War, hits the Academy this week under the direction of Advocate theater critic Chris Rohmann. Mia Wurgaft (pictured, center, with...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 16, 2012 | Stage
“Anybody who ever doubted the strength of human will and hard work and will power—oh, my god, I’m amazed at what’s possible.” Linda McInerney might be talking about the title character in the opera she has co-created. Sojourner Truth was...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 16, 2012 | Stage
In Cocktails with Larry Miller: Little League, Adultery and Other Bad Ideas, Hollywood veteran Miller, who has an extensive list of film appearances, shares his thoughts on drinking, marriage and children. (The show is not recommended for children.) March 21, 7:30...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 16, 2012 | Stage
Twenty-four teams throw down in a movie trivia challenge (and benefit for Amherst Cinema and Pleasant Street Theaters) hosted by John Hodgman (pictured, of The Daily Show) and Bill Dwight. It’s called Screen Test: Movie Trivia Madness, and judges include film...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 23, 2012 | Stage
The Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move presents its newest performance, Connected, at the Hunter Center. March 24, 8 p.m.; March 25, 3 p.m. $10/kids, $25-39/general, Mass MoCA, 87 Marshall St., North Adams, (413) 662-2111.
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 23, 2012 | Stage
Jonathan Mirin admits that part of the reason he and his wife, Godeliève Richard, created the Syrup festival was because “we wanted an excuse to perform in Memorial Hall in Shelburne Falls, where we live. It’s a historic, beautiful space.” He...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 30, 2012 | Stage
Talk about metatheater. Middletown is so conscious of its own existence that the script even includes an intermission, with audience members discussing the show. Playwright Will Eno, who’s been described as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 30, 2012 | Stage
The way things usually work is this: Someone writes a play, which goes through several drafts, readings and workshops. Then a director holds auditions to find the right cast, who rehearse it for weeks before finally presenting it to the world on opening night. The...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 14, 2012 | Stage
“William Shakespeare—a man from a hick town with a high school education.” With that disarming characterization, Shakespeare & Company begins to demystify The Greatest Poet of All Time. The show’s title, Shakespeare and the Language That...
by Advocate Staff | Apr 14, 2012 | Stage
In what’s become an annual event, Shelburne Falls’ Pothole Pictures offers the classic antics of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and the rest of the crew in the Looney Tunes Cartoon Festival. Music precedes the evening shows, with Coop Jazz on Friday and Leo T....
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 21, 2012 | Stage
Call me a philistine, but I don’t get, and therefore don’t much like, abstract expressionism. That movement, which dominated post-war American art, was fueled by the emotional intensity of German expressionism while reducing the iconoclastic abstractions...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 28, 2012 | Stage
In 1911 Marie Curie was awarded the second of her two Nobel Prizes, both connected to her discovery of radium. The radioactive element was initially hailed as a miracle substance, credited with curing cancer and other ailments, its deadly nature lurking invisibly...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 28, 2012 | Stage
In her vision of Private Lives, Emma Weinstein stacks nostalgia on top of nostalgia. Here, Noel Coward’s 1930 comedy of romantic fisticuffs looks fondly back on a bygone era looking fondly back on a bygone era. And the audience is swept into Coward’s...
by Chris Rohmann | May 5, 2012 | Stage
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the heroine, Rosalind, disguises herself as a boy, calling herself Ganymede, who then pretends to be a girl in a courtship game she plays with the boy she loves. That double switcheroo was the inspiration for the name of...
by Chris Rohmann | May 5, 2012 | Stage
“My problem with Wendy Wasserstein is that she only writes about the problems of the Upper West Side. Talk about entitlement. ‘Do I work or do I get married?’ What a dilemma!” That line is spoken in a play about a group of Mount Holyoke College...
by Chris Rohmann | May 12, 2012 | Stage
A dramatic reading from two Greek tragedies and an art gallery talk inspired by an exhibit about Negro League baseball—you’d think these two events have little or nothing to do with each other, but according to the head of the organization sponsoring both...
by Chris Rohmann | May 19, 2012 | Stage
Time was when community theater was a cozy middle-of-the-road affair that seldom strayed from the comfortably familiar. While many amateur troupes now edge into the fast lane with more challenging dramas, the musicals that require community theaters’ greatest...
by Chris Rohmann | May 26, 2012 | Stage
Two plays in the area this month, both set in the 1930s, look at the Depression era through opposite ends of the telescope. The American Clock, by Arthur Miller, is a large-canvas, 50-character epic about people caught in the shock wave of the stock market crash. The...
