Stage
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 17, 2013 | Stage
Julius Caesar is perhaps Shakespeare’s most masculine play. Only two women in the thing, each appearing in early cameos before giving way to the all-male worlds of the Roman Senate and the battlefield. So what happens when the play is turned on its macho head by...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 17, 2013 | Stage
Total verrückt is the German equivalent of “stark raving mad.” It was the ironic title of a musical revue performed, ironically and defiantly, in a Nazi concentration camp. Westerbork was a Dutch transit camp where Jews were held pending transport to...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 31, 2013 | Stage
I t’s a Wonderful Life is as hardy a staple of Christmastime entertainment as A Christmas Carol and The Nutcracker. And recently the 1946 film has joined those two theatrical chestnuts on stage. Joe Landry’s adaptation of the Frank Capra classic is...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 21, 2014 | Stage
I was in Paris last month and dropped in at the Comédie-Française, that venerable heir to Molière and Feydeau. They weren’t playing Moliëre, though, or even a comedy, but that most profound and vexing of Shakespearean dramas. La...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 5, 2014 | Stage
I am one lucky critic. I like most of what I see. A sizeable percentage of the shows I attend generously repay this theatergoer’s time and attention. I count myself especially fortunate to be theatergoing in the Valley, where so many small theaters and...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 12, 2014 | Stage
You would think that a play performed from a written script and an improvisation launched from a random idea would be, almost by definition, antithetical. If you did, Pam Victor wouldn’t agree. Victor, a member of the Ha-Ha’s, the Valley’s primo...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 19, 2014 | Stage
“Women love to talk about their vaginas,” says one of the performers in Eve Ensler’s history-making theater piece about that provocative passage. First produced in 1996 to reactions that ranged from shocked outrage to “It’s about...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 26, 2014 | Stage
As every good storyteller knows, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That famous opening line from Anna Karenina could well be the chapter heading in a writing handbook, since drama, whether literary or...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 4, 2014 | Stage
Northampton’s Academy of Music is currently developing an original play set in the 1940s, based on a steamy episode in the city’s history. Anticipating its debut next fall, the theater is setting the stage with an evening of even steamier entertainment...
by Ben Lambert | Mar 4, 2014 | Stage
Tracy Morgan has been a fixture on television and in film since the mid-1990s, but is best known as a star of NBC’s 30 Rock, winner of 16 Emmy awards over its seven-season run, and for his time as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Morgan comes to Chicopee...
by by Pete Redington | Mar 12, 2014 | Stage
Last spring, the front-of-house manager at the Academy of Music discovered an old cardboard box containing a series of letters dating back to the early 1940s. The correspondence they contain tells the story of Frank Shaughnessy, then the manager at the Academy, who...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 12, 2014 | Stage
Her inspiration, says Christian McEwen, was The Vagina Monologues, that revolutionary piece of interview theater that put a hitherto “unspeakable” subject into the public conversation. “What else,” she wondered, “do women have these...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 19, 2014 | Stage
It’s not surprising that Private Lives is one of Noël Coward’s two most-performed plays, nor that A Song at Twilight isn’t the other one. The former is an exquisite marital farce—the master of acerbic wit at the height of his...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 2, 2014 | Stage
When straight, responsible Agnes comes across the gaming module left behind by her dead alpha-nerd sister, she’s thrust into a world that includes not only dungeons and dragons, but homicidal fairies, raunchy ogres and bloodthirsty cheerleaders, as the fantasy...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 2, 2014 | Stage
Two shows at Springfield’s Symphony Hall this weekend represent classic points on the entertainment spectrum: the Broadway musical and the variety show. Todd Oliver & Friends combines a number of variety-act staples. Oliver is a ventriloquist with a rock...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 9, 2014 | Stage
In fair Verona, where Shakespeare lays his scene, Romeo and Juliet kiss on a balcony while the young bloods of their feuding families fight it out in the street. In New York, four centuries and countless adaptations later, their tragic tale is being reenacted on...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 9, 2014 | Stage
When Andrea Chinedu Nwoke thinks of Fannie Lou Hamer, her thoughts go back to her grandmother. “The things Fannie went through, the hurdles she faced, are much the same as my grandmother did,” says Nwoke, whose African-American forebears lived in a time of...
by James Heflin | Apr 16, 2014 | Stage
Brian Regan has made audiences laugh for three decades. He still remembers what it was like at first to stand up in front of a crowd and try to get that laughter started. “It’s scary. It’s also exhilarating. It’s wrapped up in one big emotional...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 23, 2014 | Stage
The Royal Frog Ballet (pictured) is a Montague-based “amoeba of collaborators” who are “committed to the creative manifestation of ideas and issues of the heart and of the land, of the belly and of the town.” How fitting that they should team...
by James Heflin | Apr 30, 2014 | Stage
For Alonzo King, a piece of choreography isn’t just a dance. It is instead a “thought structure,” one which addresses and employs the laws of physics. Through his “thought structures,” King hopes to create new kinds of expression and even...
by James Heflin | May 7, 2014 | Stage
For a lot of people, spring’s arrival calls for dancing. This week, the Lisa Leizman Dance Company, a resident company of the Northampton Center for the Arts, celebrates the long-awaited breakout of an apparently reluctant spring. What’s more, the company...
by Chris Rohmann | May 7, 2014 | Stage
Three comedy acts in a row are lining up for performances in Springfield this week and next. First up is Etta May, “the Queen of Southern Sass,” headliner of the Southern Fried Chicks comedy tour, appearing solo at CityStage on Friday, May 2. Her act, she...
by Chris Rohmann | May 14, 2014 | Stage
For many people, opera is the highest and noblest form of theater—high-flown drama married to ravishing music sung by glorious voices, lifting it to a higher plane than mere spoken dialogue or opera’s downmarket cousin, the musical. But I’ve never...
by Chris Rohmann | May 28, 2014 | Stage
This week sees the culmination of an adventurous three-week process led by the French choreographer Thierry Thieû Niang. A co-presentation of MIFA Victory Theatre and Vermont Performance Lab, du Printemps reimagines the once-scandalous Rite of Spring,...
by James Heflin | May 28, 2014 | Stage
When the play Skyscraper hits the stage this week, it offers one intriguing resonance with reality, and it offers an equally intriguing take on the financial model of putting on shows and paying participants. The play focuses on the lives of six people (two of them...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 4, 2014 | Stage
“We’re trying to get the most visual bang for the smallest spatial buck,” says Alan Schneider, one of the artists behind PanOpera. He’s standing beside a tall, narrow steel scaffold which serves as the multipurpose set for the group’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 11, 2014 | Stage
This season, as Britain’s National Theatre marks its 50th anniversary, the company also celebrates the fifth year of NT Live, its series of performances satellite-beamed from its London stage and other U.K. venues. What started in fall 2009 as a risky experiment...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 11, 2014 | Stage
The “it” in the expression You Can’t Take It With You usually refers to money, but in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s giddy 1936 screwball comedy, it’s life itself. The Sycamores are an extended family of optimistic misfits who...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 18, 2014 | Stage
In the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson’s poems are often found lists of words and phrases—variations and alternatives to parts of the text. Inspired by the poet’s perception of multiple possibilities for conveying multifaceted thoughts, The Emily...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 18, 2014 | Stage
You wouldn’t expect a show its makers describe as “funny, witty, and honest” to be about, as the subtitle explains, “Healing from sexual violence within a culture that encourages it.” But that’s what The World We Live In Is Not The...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 9, 2014 | Stage
You’d think two sets of identical twins running around Ephesus, mixing up everything and everybody, was crazy enough. But in Brianna Sloane’s production of The Comedy of Errors for Hampshire Shakespeare Company, that mixup does an additional 180. All the...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 9, 2014 | Stage
The country’s oldest dance festival is still acting like a youngster. This summer’s lineup of over 350 performances and other events at Jacob’s Pillow includes hip-hop, innovative tap, interdisciplinary experiments and other boundary-breaking...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 16, 2014 | Stage
Both of Chester Theatre Company’s first two summer productions pose a geographic puzzle. The first one, Madagascar, takes place mostly in Rome. The second, Annapurna, which opens this week, is set within sight of a mountain peak, but in Colorado, not Nepal....
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 23, 2014 | Stage
“The coffee is usually on by 9:30, and the Clybourne Park rehearsal starts at 10,” explained Sam Rush when I asked him what time I should arrive. “But that’s the morning the kids’ show opens, so they’ll be doing last-minute things...
by James Heflin | Jul 23, 2014 | Stage
When Rythea Lee steps onto a stage, her remarkable calm is striking, even inviting. She looks right at the audience, and seems untroubled by a flock of expectant faces. She often performs in crowded living rooms, where she can look audience members in the eye, up...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 23, 2014 | Stage
I generally don’t do best-of lists, but halfway through the summer season I can point to one show that, in this critic’s book, is the pick of the lot so far. Shakespeare’s Will, at Shakespeare & Company, is a fanciful reconsideration of the Swan...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 30, 2014 | Stage
Silverthorne Theater Company, the newest entry on the Valley summer theater circuit, is starting small, but plans to grow incrementally and become fully professional within five years. The upstart troupe, based at Northfield Mount Hermon School, continues its...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 6, 2014 | Stage
Double Edge Theatre’s summertime series of family-friendly “traveling spectacles” showcase the company’s interdisciplinary aesthetic—an amalgam of movement theater, world music and circus skills—to produce playful, athletic and...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 6, 2014 | Stage
“Lizzie Borden took an axe…” goes the rhyme, and it’s almost like a grisly nursery tale. Though Lizzie was acquitted of killing her father and stepmother in 1892, she has passed into the popular imagination as a crazed murderess. Jack...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 21, 2014 | Stage
Two shows playing this weekend share a thematic thread: the elusive nature of truth and its potential for violent upheavals in families and friendships. A Hatful of Rain, in Stockbridge, is a volcanic 1950s drama set in the aftermath of war; Collected Stories, in...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 21, 2014 | Stage
“Guess what this is that I’m drawing,” says six-year-old Velda. “It’s Jesus.” “Man Enters Amish Schoolhouse and Opens Fire,” says the CNN headline. “Some woman came up to me in the grocery and said, ‘If you...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 21, 2014 | Stage
The most common question I hear grownups asking kids after a children’s theater performance is, “What part did you like best?” Sometimes the answer is “All of it,” sometimes it’s a noncommittal shrug, but very often there are one or...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 27, 2014 | Stage
This summer’s keynote Shakespeare is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was the company’s very first production, in 1978, when Simotes himself played Puck. It’s a big, brash staging with an audacious concept and a large cast. But most of the...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 3, 2014 | Stage
In September 1941, as Nazi Germany consolidated its hold on most of Europe, two of the century’s indispensable physicists met in Copenhagen, Denmark. Former colleagues, both of them key figures in the development of quantum theory, Niels Bohr and Werner...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 10, 2014 | Stage
Sheng Dong is a Taiwan-based troupe whose name means “A Moving Sound”—a fitting moniker for a company that not only blends music and movement, but moves, so to speak, between the worlds of Chinese and other Asian traditions and modern Western forms....
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 10, 2014 | Stage
In another life, another world, I was a folkie—a singer/songwriter plying the folk clubs in the wake of the folk revival and protest-song movement, one of Woody Guthrie’s multitude of musical progeny. Woody’s work, his example and his...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 17, 2014 | Stage
It’s a fairy tale (for grownups only) about a traveling circus (down on its luck), “weaving poetry, obscenity, magic and love” into a contemporary take on an ancient story, inspired by the poet Rumi’s injunction to “unfold your own...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 17, 2014 | Stage
Improv and stand-up are two sides of the comedy coin, the one conjured out of thin air from crowd suggestions and seat-of-the-pants inspiration, the other honed through careful practice and, as often as not, hostile audiences. The Valley’s premier improv troupe,...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 24, 2014 | Stage
Every year or so I give myself a disagreeable chore, always hoping it will be less depressing than last time. I look at the plays presented in the region’s theaters to see how many are by, or directed by, women. And I’m usually disappointed. It’s a...
by James Heflin | Sep 24, 2014 | Stage
When it comes to having a rough time in school, I know a thing or two. Not because I wasn’t a good student—I possess, somewhere in the back of the closet, actual medals for citizenship and algebra—but because I spent so much time as the new kid,...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 24, 2014 | Stage
The hurricane that devastated southern Louisiana in 2005 has become a symbol of human folly, injustice and resilience. Katrina was the poster-storm for the multiplying ravages of global warming, soon joined by siblings Irene and Sandy, which made sobering visits to...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 8, 2014 | Stage
Three summers ago, Kali Quinn brought her one-woman—no, three-woman—show, Overture to a Thursday Morning, to the Ko Festival of Performance in Amherst. After performing it in New York and coast to coast, this weekend she brings an expanded, two-part...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 15, 2014 | Stage
Two weeks ago in this space, I bemoaned the under-representation of women playwrights and directors on so many of the region’s stages. I said that out of 35 full productions at the area’s six professional legit theaters this past summer, six were written...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2014 | Stage
shouts Sheila Siragusa, striding onto the stage from the empty auditorium. “Every molecule of you says, ‘I cannot wait to get out of this room and back to the theater.’” She’s speaking to Susan Daniels, and her comment carries a certain...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 5, 2014 | Stage
“My parents’ love for each other was forged, in part, by their separation during the Korean War,” writes Susan Thompson in her playwright’s note to Unforgettable: Letters from Korea. “So were essential elements of who they became. During...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 5, 2014 | Stage
I don’t know if it’s the fact that this year is his 450th birthday, or if some “enforced obedience of planetary influence,” as one of his villains says, caused this constellation, but this weekend and next, four of the Five Colleges are staging...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 12, 2014 | Stage
The plots that W.S. Gilbert contrived for the comic operas he wrote with Arthur Sullivan often turned on what he called “topsy-turvy” situations, where normal reality is upended and absurdity reigns. The Yeomen of the Guard is the duo’s most striking...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 19, 2014 | Stage
You don’t often catch the Theater Project dabbling in fantasy. Anthropomorphic animals are a distinct rarity onstage at the troupe’s Majestic Theater. But Harvey, the six-and-a-half-foot rabbit currently residing there, is no Disneyfied fuzzy bunny....
by Pete Redington | Nov 29, 2014 | Stage
As a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, John Hodgman plays the Deranged Millionaire and the Resident Expert, the latter of which grew as an extension of his first book, The Areas of My Expertise. On Bored To Death he plays Louis Greene, the nemesis to...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 3, 2014 | Stage
The Mount, Edith Wharton’s summer home in Lenox, is now a museum that preserves memories of her Gilded Age life and times. When Shakespeare & Company shared the premises with the Wharton Restoration, the troupe staged original dramatic adaptations of her...
