Stage
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 25, 2013 | Stage
It’s entirely apt that Shakespeare & Company has mounted The Liar as its late-winter entertainment. For one thing, David Ives’ up-to-the-minute adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 17th-century farce was commissioned a couple of years ago by another...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 4, 2013 | Stage
Each spring, the reawakening of the region’s maple trees serves as inspiration for an intergenerational “celebration of sap” in Shelburne Falls. The fourth annual Syrup performing arts festival fills this weekend with music, theater, dance and...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 4, 2013 | Stage
Maureen is overweight and single, her sister Sheila is slim and married, and neither of them is getting any younger. Maureen uses self-deprecating humor to mask her insecurities, while Sheila depends on cosmetic surgery. In Jon Lonoff’s romantic comedy Skin...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 11, 2013 | Stage
You’d think Man in a Case would be exactly the wrong vehicle for Mikhail Baryshnikov. Here is a man we associate, above all, with acrobatic physicality, weightless grace and a history of fearless boundary-breaking, playing a man obsessed with rules and decorum,...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 11, 2013 | Stage
“This is the first time in six years I’ve directed a production that’s stayed in one space the entire time,” says Jonathan Diamond. He is referring to his truly epic stage version of The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings prequel....
by Advocate Staff | Mar 18, 2013 | Stage
Despite the oft-recited adage of the anti-gay contingent, sometimes it really is Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve. That’s the case with PVPA’s production of The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, which follows the couples Adam and Steve and Jane and Mabel from...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 25, 2013 | Stage
You wouldn’t think of Scott Goldman, principal of Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School, or Chris Rohmann, theater director and critic (full disclosure: he writes the Advocate’s Stage Struck column), as the types to ignite a firestorm. But...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 1, 2013 | Stage
The Rainbow Players don’t exactly reject terms like “tolerance,” “acceptance” and “inclusion,” they simply transcend them. This 13-year-old troupe of youth and adults with physical, developmental and learning disabilities uses...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 1, 2013 | Stage
“Willliam Shakespeare—a man from a hick town with a high school education.” With that disarming characterization, Shakespeare & Company demystifies the often daunting Bard of Avon. Shakespeare and the Language That Shaped a World, a 45-minute...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 1, 2013 | Stage
The Grey Goo Theory imagines the world ending, not in fire or ice, but in a global cancer of self-replicating nanotechnology that ultimately devours the biosphere. The idea has morphed into an omnibus term deploring the insidious penetration of digital technology into...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 1, 2013 | Stage
“The first rule is this: you can’t say ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it.’ This isn’t useful information—useful to you, but not to anybody else. “And you can’t say ‘I disagree’ with what...
by James Heflin | Apr 8, 2013 | Stage
The Pioneer Valley Performing Arts charter school’s Catalyst Dance Company celebrates 15 years of movement with Dancing in the Eye of the Storm. The evening includes works by Bill T. Jones, hip-hop choreographer James Morrow and Catalyst founder Jodi Falk. April...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 15, 2013 | Stage
In the end, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told was performed without incident—inside the Academy of Music, at least. Outside the building, another story was taking place. All three performances last month attracted demonstrators on both...
by Chris Rohmann | May 3, 2013 | Stage
Four male characters dominate this week’s Valley theater. Not too surprising, considering women’s chronic underrepresentation in dramatis personae from the Greeks to the present, but a bit so, since two of the productions are at all-women’s colleges....
by Chris Rohmann | May 7, 2013 | Stage
“I feel like this play is an incredible amalgamation and a sort of a full circle of Valley talent,” says Julie Waggoner, who is half the cast of a new six-character play. She stars with Jeannine Haas in Red State of Marriage, written specifically for them...
by Chris Rohmann | May 14, 2013 | Stage
Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun took the reader on a harrowing, heartbreaking trip into the head of Joe Bonham, a World War I soldier who’s lost not only his limbs but his sight, hearing and speech—a lump of “living...
by James Heflin | May 21, 2013 | Stage
Contemporary dance, often considered among the most rarefied of art forms, may not seem like something you’d find in a southern Vermont grange hall. Thanks to Vermont Performance Lab, however, rural southern Vermont has become an increasingly attractive place...
by Chris Rohmann | May 29, 2013 | Stage
When I first met Vincent Dowling in 1990, the year he founded the Miniature Theatre of Chester, he regaled me with tales of his early life as an itinerant actor, doing “fit-ups”—one-night stands on makeshift stages—in small towns all over his...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 4, 2013 | Stage
Sex is in the air on two Hartford stages. On one, sexual longing and confusion, Shakespeare style; on the other, the queen of sex talk. That would be Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive sex therapist known for her witty, unabashed approach to bedroom issues....
by James Heflin | Jun 11, 2013 | Stage
This weekend, southern Vermont becomes a hotbed of exciting experimental theater from Vermont Performance Lab and Sandglass Theater. Not What Happened (pictured) is a new piece from three-time Obie award-winning writer/director/performer Ain Gordon. The piece includes...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 11, 2013 | Stage
Spring isn’t officially over and already the summer theater season is underway. Two shows are up and running in the Berkshires, with dozens more waiting impatiently in the wings. I count over 50 productions lined up in Western Mass. companies’ regular...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 18, 2013 | Stage
Two shows opening this week at Barrington Stage Company illustrate the poles theater can occupy: On the Town, a big, kick-up-your-heels musical originally created to raise wartime spirits in the 1940s, and Muckrakers, a terse, tense two-character drama sprung from...
by Advocate Staff | Jun 26, 2013 | Stage
Star-Crossed Lovers Federico García Lorca’s poetic tragedy Blood Wedding is positively operatic in its depiction of scalding passion, desperate romance and lethal jealousy. So it’s no surprise that it’s now become a folk opera at the hands of...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 2, 2013 | Stage
Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik are the words-and-music team responsible for Spring Awakening, that loud, rude, impassionated hit musical bursting with adolescent energy and angst. Their new work, Arms on Fire, is a quieter but equally heartfelt piece, not a full-scale...
by Julia Mines | Jul 9, 2013 | Stage
Go to the Congregational Church in Greenfield on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month and you’ll find Greenfield Improv Group, or GIG, where you’re both audience and improviser. “I didn’t intend that,” says Amy Swisher, referring...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 23, 2013 | Stage
Double Edge Theatre is eager to dispel impressions that this summer’s traveling spectacle, Shahrazad, is a remount of 2009’s Arabian Nights. Sure, both are drawn from that classic compendium of tales recounted by an Arabian princess to entertain a king and...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 16, 2013 | Stage
The Ha-Has comedy group was created by accident in 2003 when Pam Victor, then an improv newbie, offered to do a show at her local library—and then had to form a group to perform it. The group’s original name, The Ha-Ha Sisterhood, was also...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 23, 2013 | Stage
Picture a traditional dance class in a conservatory studio: a group of young dancers, mostly female, mostly white, in leotards and leg warmers, stretching and practicing pliés at the barre to classical piano accompaniment. Now picture this: 24 young dancers,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 23, 2013 | Stage
Only three of Shakespeare & Company’s ten major productions this season are by Shakespeare. There’s another “classic,” by Molière, and all the rest are modern—the “& company” part of the troupe’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 30, 2013 | Stage
There was a coincidental unifying image in the three shows I saw the other day in Great Barrington: flowing white fabric. In one piece, a broad sheet served as tablecloth, prayer rug and other quotidian coverings; in another, a formal gown literally covered the stage;...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 30, 2013 | Stage
The mysterious relationship of the great Russian composer Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his great patroness, the wealthy widow Madame Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, forms the tantalizing basis for None but the Lonely Heart. The new piece is a guest production at...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 6, 2013 | Stage
Stranger-than-fiction category: Robert Eads was a self-described “hillbilly and proud of it,” living in “Bubba-land” among good ol’ boys who never guessed he was transgendered. Kate Davis’ 2001 film documented his life and the...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 13, 2013 | Stage
Martin McDonagh’s films—2008’s In Bruges and last year’s Seven Psychopaths—are black comedies in the mold of the Coen brothers. But his plays are darker affairs. Two trilogies set in the lonesome west of Ireland depict aimless lives and...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 13, 2013 | Stage
Benedick and Beatrice, the prickly lovers in Much Ado About Nothing, are the most delightfully notorious in a long line of squabbling sweethearts who say they can’t bear each other but can’t bear to be without each other. Indeed, there’s a...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 13, 2013 | Stage
“I am on a journey to push the envelope,” says Sheryl Stoodley, founder and director of Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble. The envelope, for her, is the American stage, and the latest stop on the journey is Blind Dreamers, a piece of devised theater...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 20, 2013 | Stage
Jacob’s Pillow Dance concludes its season this weekend with a look back to its roots and a forward-looking performance representative of the genre’s future. Although its founder is long gone, the Martha Graham Dance Company carries on the legacy of that...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 20, 2013 | Stage
Daffy Duck is hugging a six-year-old who’s half his height. The flaky fowl has jumped off the screen and onto the midway at Six Flags New England theme park, where he cavorts daily with Bugs, Tweety Pie, Foghorn, Marvin the Martian and other celluloid pals from...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 3, 2013 | Stage
Wilder/Williams is a coupling of two lesser known one-act plays by American masters. The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, by Thornton Wilder, is an early exploration of the deceptively mundane themes epitomized in Our Town. Tennessee Williams’ Talk to Me...
by Advocate Staff | Sep 4, 2013 | Stage
“Scott” is F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Hem” is Ernest Hemingway. The Garden of Allah is a star-infested apartment building in Hollywood where Fitzgerald holed up for a spell in the 1930s and where, in Mark St. Germain’s new play, Scott and Hem...
by Advocate Staff | Sep 24, 2013 | Stage
Since its inception five years ago, First Generation Ensemble, the youth-focused arm of Springfield’s social justice-inspired theater company Performance Project, has worked with area teens to create, develop and present performances in which the young adults...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 24, 2013 | Stage
For some time now, I’ve been noticing that in their advertising, theaters tend to emphasize—often overemphasize—the comedic or otherwise convivial aspects of their shows, even when they’re patently not comedies. While the descriptives...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 1, 2013 | Stage
The most thrilling non-musical moment in the stage version of Les Misérables is a trick of the set. As the young revolutionaries prepare their uprising against poverty and injustice, the buildings of Paris collapse before our eyes to become the rebels’...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 8, 2013 | Stage
Double Edge Theatre may call their Ashfield farmstead home, but they are a world-class, and world-traveling, company. Their latest production—that is, not counting their annual farm-spanning summer spectacle—was premiered at Washington, D.C.’s Arena...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 8, 2013 | Stage
It’s a coincidence, but not a surprise, that both productions of Othello I’ve seen recently are set on military bases in today’s Middle East. The garrison in Shakespeare’s tragedy isn’t that far from an outpost in Kandahar. The same rules...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 15, 2013 | Stage
At the end of Lorraine Hansberry’s precedent-shattering play A Raisin in the Sun, the Younger family are preparing to move out of their cramped apartment in an all-black Chicago neighborhood into a house “with a garden” in an all-white suburb. This...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2013 | Stage
In 1913, composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky electrified the ballet world with The Rite of Spring, a brash, iconoclastic piece that broke all the prevailing rules, scandalized Parisian ears and set the rest of the 20th century in motion. In...
by Pete Redington | Oct 22, 2013 | Stage
Bill Maher tends to say things a bit bluntly. A few weeks ago, on his weekly HBO show Real Time, he suggested that California would lead the way to a modern, liberal American society because, with 40 million residents, the Golden State is by itself the eighth largest...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2013 | Stage
A world-premiere musical about what dolls get up to when no one’s looking. A fragmentary play about a fragmenting mind. A French farce about an insatiable liar. And a performance installation about fat. That diverse menu of productions is under the lights this...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2013 | Stage
The third annual Double Take Fringe Festival romps through a variety of underused spaces and architectural curiosities this weekend in downtown Greenfield. The eight mini-productions range from a Chekhov farce to a Tennessee Williams parody, from improvisational...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 30, 2013 | Stage
When I was living in London in the ’70s, a new theater was rising on the South Bank— a colossal cement pile of a building, spawn of the same architectural school of thought as the UMass Fine Arts Center, and just as ugly. (It was famously compared by...
by Ben Lambert | Oct 30, 2013 | Stage
The societal standards we often consider iron-clad—what is familiar, normal and what is “other”—are ultimately rather fluid, based only on tradition and the strength of our collective belief. Power Animal Systems, a multimedia performance...
by Jack Brown | Nov 5, 2013 | Stage
Ira Glass, creator of the long-running public radio program This American Life, has become a new generation’s answer to Garrison Keillor. Like Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion variety show before it, This American Life, though a very different kind of...
by Ben Lambert | Nov 5, 2013 | Stage
The first “issue” of Live Art Magazine!, a new, annual stage venture with the shape and structure of an art and music magazine, is almost ready for your perusal. The first few performers set the tone for the evening, with a quick-hitting series of short,...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 12, 2013 | Stage
Your typical tour of a historical mansion invites you to see the house through the eyes of its wealthy and powerful owners. You glide through sumptuous public rooms and peep into ornate bedchambers, with perhaps a passing reference to the household’s servants as...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 12, 2013 | Stage
“There’s only three things the guys let you be if you’re a girl in the military—a bitch, a ho or a dyke. You can’t win.” So says one of the real-life women depicted in The Lonely Soldier Project. Subtitled “a nonfiction...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 19, 2013 | Stage
Conspiracy theory is a volatile beast. It stirs strong passions, pitting true believers against equally pious defenders of the official line. On one side are those who find plots and cover-ups in contradictions, murky doings and can’t-be-coincidences. On the...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 19, 2013 | Stage
They start the day with a 16-mile run, followed by rehearsals on a veritable orchestra of Taiko drums. Then, for more than half the year, they tour the world with a show that combines precision rhythms with explosive sound and near-acrobatic showmanship. They are...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 27, 2013 | Stage
WAM Theatre exists on two levels: to produce work that foregrounds women playwrights and performers, and to tangibly support, with a portion of ticket sales, organizations that work to better the lives of women and girls. Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 4, 2013 | Stage
In Stick Fly, conflicts over race, class and privilege simmer and then boil over. Lydia R. Diamond’s comedy-drama, set in the luxurious Vineyard summer home of a prosperous African-American family, stirs the domestic pot when the two sons show up with their new...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 4, 2013 | Stage
Recalling a time of revolutionary turmoil and religious frenzy in mid-17th-century England, Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire turns its beam on our own time as well. Written in 1976, as the ’60s impulse gave way to war-weary cynicism, the...
