Stage
Valley Advocate Podcast: Advocate Theater Critic Chris Rohmann directs Tar2f!
For nearly as long as the Advocate has been around, Chris Rohmann has been writing theater reviews for it. But about a decade ago he got the chance to be on the other side of a production as a director and got hooked. Next month, Rohmann will be directing Tar2f!, a...
Stagestruck: Backstage with the Director of Tar2f! — Me
It might seem like a conflict of interest, but for me, it’s a confluence of interests. You see, in addition to being the Advocate’s theater critic, I’m also a director. I work both sides of the curtain, so to speak. When I’m not sitting in a theater watching actors...
Pick of the Day 3/22: Shut Up, Emily Dickinson
Smith College wants Emily Dickinson to just shut up already! There’s no better way to describe this show than “Emily Dickinson: poet, recluse, a**hole.” HA!!! And furthermore, this is “a pseudo-historical, quasi-biographical, hysterically existential...
Pick of the Day 3/17: High Mud Comedy Fest at MASS MoCA in North Adams
It’s the second day of the High Mud Comedy Fest and you’re invited to MASS MoCA to get in on the fun. Headlined by Mike Birbiglia of This American Life, comedians will spend the late afternoon and evening making funny. At 4 p.m. you can take a...
Infants of the Spring: A new play views the Harlem Renaissance with a jaundiced eye
The artistic nexus of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement is remembered as a great flowering of black talent and a golden age in American cultural history. But at least one of its members, looking at it from the inside, saw it quite...
Pick of the Day 3/10: The Valley Letters Project: Live on Stage at the Academy of Music
Susan B. Anthony, Alexander Graham Bell, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Helen Keller, Leonard Nimoy, Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvia Plath, Dr. Seuss, Sojourner Truth and Kurt Vonnegut have all impacted the Pioneer Valley in one way or another. Tonight,...
Stagestruck: Defying Gravity, Again
That wizard of wise foolery known as Avner the Eccentric is back. Avner Eisenberg is a genius of physical comedy and quick-witted clowning whose whimsical website states that “as a kid his passions were snakes and juggling. He wanted to be a doctor, but after a year...
Stagestruck: Willkommen to “Cabaret”
As I wrote in this space last year, “So much of what we see and create seems newly topical and timely” since the rise of Trump. “Everything is now filtered through a horrifying new prism, taking on fresh meaning and urgency.” A striking example of the “Trump Effect”...
Pick of the Day 3/4: AIC Theater Arts Program presents ‘Doubt: A Parable’
American International College’s Theater Arts Program presents John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Doubt: A Parable. Described as a “brilliant play” that asks many questions but challenges you to find your own answers. Doubt: A...
Stagestruck: Happier Valley Comedy expanding on improv
A troupe of high-spirited performers bound onstage and solicit goofy suggestions for characters and situations from the audience. Then they improvise short, snappy scenes based on those prompts. The comedy flows from the incongruities and the improvisers’ quick wits....
Pick of the Day 2/26: The Jeff Holmes Big Band at the 121 Club
The big band sound never gets old, so if you’re free at 7:30 tonight, check out the stylings of the Jeff Holmes Big Band featuring composer/lyricist Dawning Holmes on vocals. They’re swinging at the 121 Club and it’s free. Holmes has performed with legendary stars...
Pick of the Day 2/25: Outside Mullingar at the Majestic Theater
As the mighty Shakespeare (or the Martian) might say, “here’s the rub”: Anthony and Rosemary are two clueless, lovelorn neighbors. Anthony’s father Tony and Rosemary’s mother Aoife are locked in a bitter land feud. Rosemary has been...
The Art of Laughter: A Conversation with Comedian Kim Deshields
Comedian Kim “Boney” DeShields is funny, except when she’s talking about making people laugh. “It’s an art,” she says matter of factly. “You have to be smart to make people laugh. You have to be well read and knowledgeable about a lot of things. But most of all,...
Pick of the Day 2/17: Nicholas Ryder Quintet at the Bing
Nicholas Ryder Quintet at the Bing Arts Center It’s a good night to check in at the Bing Arts Center and warm up with some cool jazz. Nicholas Ryder Quintet will dig into some songbook standards and tunes by the legendary likes of “Long Tall Dexter”...
Pick of the Day 2/16: Robin Hood at New England Youth Theater
Robin Hood Sherwood Forest never gets old. Since the 15 century, Robin Hood (dressed in Lincoln green) and his lovable merry band have been roving the forest robbing the rich and giving to the poor in swashbuckling heroic style. Throughout film and theater, this...
Stagestruck: Marx and Sparks
If, like me, you thought the National Theatre’s production of One Man, Two Guv’nors, either on NT Live or Broadway, was the funniest, wittiest farce you’ve ever seen (with Noises Off a close second), chances are you’ll enjoy Young Marx. It’s on this weekend at Amherst...
Stagestruck: Something Rotten! — a tasty musical dish
I grew up on Shakespeare and musicals, so what was I to make of Something Rotten!, the hit musical that mercilessly lampoons both? Love it for its origins or hate it for its irreverence? Having missed it on Broadway, where it earned a double handful of Tony...
Stagestruck: Love in the Multiverse
Constellations, playing at TheaterWorks in Hartford through Feb. 18, looks at love and second chances through a prism of reflecting and refracting fun-house mirrors – or more accurately, through a spectrum of infinite chances. Nick Payne’s two-hander isn’t exactly a...
Stagestruck: High Drama in the Library
You wouldn’t think a library would be a likely setting for high drama, but here we are with two playing at once. In Hartford, Sharon Washington is telling the story of her girlhood, when she lived, not virtually but literally, in a library. And in West Springfield,...
Stagestruck: Gender Parity Still Elusive in Theater
In this time of long-overdue comeuppance for sexual harassment and assault, I approached my annual reckoning of gender equity in theater with fresh eyes. Nationwide, women continue to be devalued and underrepresented in almost all areas of theatrical creation, on and...
Stagestruck: Diversifying Nostalgia in Western Mass Theater
In this season of holiday entertainments that cater to our appetite for cozy tradition (I’m talking about you, Nutcracker, Messiah, and Christmas Carol), two shows this weekend hit the nostalgia nerve from contrary angles. In the Berkshires, a new play adds a “What...
Stagestruck: It’s Bedlam on These Stages
“Bedlam” is an apt moniker for the ever-adventurous theater company going by that name. Their whirlwind adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility recently wowed New York (and comes to Cambridge beginning this weekend – see below). Now they’re back on sort-of...
Stagestruck: Sondheim’s Follies, onstage, on screen
Perhaps surprisingly, the Brits do American musicals really well. The National Theatre, in particular, has a long history of reinvigorating Broadway classics. The theater’s extensive relationship with Stephen Sondheim’s works continues with its current hit production...
Stagestruck: One-woman show ‘Pulse’ shines light on Scottish musical roots
Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble, rooted in the Valley for over two decades, is spreading its limbs. Long the area’s prime site for physical-theater training and performance that explores the reaches of expression through voice and movement, the company has lately...
Stagestruck: Not Your Bobble-head Einstein
Though it harks back more than 100 years, Jack Fry’s Einstein! shuns the usual retrospective approach to solo shows portraying celebrities. This one is both timeless and time-stamped. The title character appears to us “from the beyond,” complaining about the popular...
Stagestruck: The Fruits of Poetry
Note: An earlier version of this article contained several errors. They have now been corrected. In 1999, Time magazine named its pick for “the song of the century.” That song was “Strange Fruit,” perhaps an odd choice from the songbook of the era that gave birth to...
Stagestruck: House of Terrors
The current world-premiere production at Hartford Stage (through Nov. 12) is “based on a true story,” according to the publicity, which is otherwise unforthcoming about its real-life inspiration. No matter. The premise for Sarah Gancher’s Seder is dramatic enough to...
Stagestruck: Babylon in Vermont
As artists, how can one watch the millions of refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, not to mention countries in Africa and Asia, and not want to address this issue? That question provoked the latest handmade production from Sandglass Theater, the world-class...
Stagestruck: Runaways and Refugees
“Once upon a time / There was a boy or a girl / Who ran far away from home …” But this is no fairy tale. Runaways, which opens this week at UMass, is a grown-up musical about homeless children — kids who have fled from home and are living on the street....
Stagestruck: Going for Goal
The timing was kind of perfect. Last week, just as the U.S. men’s soccer team was being eliminated from qualifying for next year’s World Cup, Hartford’s TheaterWorks was opening The Wolves, an energetic if puzzling play about women’s soccer. Make that girls’ soccer....
Stagestruck: A Light, a Lake and a Lady
In last week’s column I covered a fistful of shows playing in the Valley, and now it’s the Berkshires’ turn. Shakespeare & Company’s God of Carnage recently completed a late-season run, and three quite varied fall productions are now running on other western...
Stagestruck — Fall Harvest: A Bumper Crop of Valley Shows
At the end of summer, there’s a pause before the fall season unfolds — or rather, explodes. Suddenly, this weekend and next there’s a bumper crop of shows in an abundance of Valley venues. By my count, no fewer than seven productions are on hand — 21 if you count the...
Stagestruck: “Tuna” on Wry − Lake Wobegon, Texas-style
One way to put a big play on a small stage and stay on budget is by having two actors play all the parts. In Silverthorne Theater Company’s current offering, that’s not a cost-cutting shortcut, it’s the key concept. Greater Tuna, playing this weekend and next,...
Stagestruck: Culture Clashes on the Border and on the Island
Two plays in the Valley this weekend couldn’t be more different but at the same time so close to the bone of our current national crisis of xenophobia and identity. Building the Wall, in Northampton, is a tense confrontation that touches on today’s headlines and then...
Stagestruck: Summer Theater Wrap Party, in Living Color
The area’s summer theaters have folded their metaphorical tents for the year, though three of the Berkshire companies are also mounting fall shows. For this critic, it was a Sergio Leone season: good, bad, and occasionally ugly. (An example of the extremes —...
Hidden Figures in the Silent Sky
When Robert Freedman tells people about Silent Sky, the play he directs this weekend at the Shea Theater, they often think he’s talking about Hidden Figures, the recent movie about black women mathematicians who worked as “computers” for NASA in the 1960s. But, he...
Northampton’s ‘Beefcake’ Scandal
Fifty-seven years ago this month, agents of the Anti-Smut Unit of the Massachusetts State Police raided the Northampton apartment of Smith College literature professor Newton Arvin and discovered copies of “beefcake” magazines he had collected and shared with friends....
The Shea Is Haunted … Wanna See?
Come Play With Ghosts In Deus Ex Machina, audience members become part of the show — a vaudeville rehearsal at The Shea, the ghosts of the past, the costuming, the makeup —through dozens of disorienting and thrilling encounters, and reunite when the world resolves at...
Stagestruck: Angels & Obsessions at NT Live
If there is a genuine epic in American drama − its ideas as expansive as its scope − it is surely Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s two-part, eight-hour “gay fantasia on national themes.” And if there is a consummate example of cross-disciplinary provenance on the...
Stagestruck: Two Women, Intimate dramas explore shifting connections
A pair of two-handers, playing through this month and just next weekend respectively, examine intimate, intricate relationships between women. Harbor Stage Company, one of the region’s most reliably stimulating summer theaters, premieres its adaption of a cinema...
Stagestruck: Ending on a Laugh
New Century Theatre is closing its summer season as it began — with “a full-out comedy,” as director Sam Rush puts it. This one is The 39 Steps, a jokey reconstruction of Alfred Hitchcock’s epic 1935 thriller. Or perhaps I should say deconstruction, since it’s...
Stagestruck: Old-Fashioned Fun
The Fitzpatrick Mainstage on the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Stockbridge campus is the site of what I’m told is the country’s oldest continuously operating summer theater. For 89 years the building, converted from a former casino in 1928 by Broadway star Eva Le...
Stagestruck: ‘This’ Drama as Sitcom Is ‘Too Snappy, Too Loud’
This is the title of the play now running at Barrington Stage Company (through August 27). But it might be more accurately called This and That. Melissa James Gibson’s script is a grab-bag of seriocomic situations, satirical barbs and personal anguish that harks back...
Love, Hate, and Horniness With Sondheim’s ‘Company’!
Company, one of Stephen Sondheim’s early musicals, is a funny, relatable, and insightful look at marriage, divorce, and single life. The story follows Bobby, a single man on his 35th birthday, who is celebrating with his married friends — who are all in various...
Ballerinas in the Wild this Saturday in Brattleboro
Ballet and farming go together like fine art and craft beer — the combo isn’t typical, but it should be. On Saturday, Vermont’s Farm to Ballet troupe will perform at Retreat Farm in Brattleboro, an historic farm dating back to 1836 that has long shared a connection...
Stagestruck: Chekhov in Middle School – WTF…
What is it with all the Chekhov parodies? Just this summer Silverthorne Theater Company gave us Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner’s metatheatrical riff on The Seagull. There’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Christopher Durang’s Uncle Vanya mashup. And last year...
Stagestruck: This Weekend Features ‘Slowgirl’ and ‘Doctor Doolitte’
Two small-scale productions playing in the area this weekend have one thing in common. They both take place in the jungle. Apart from that, they couldn’t be more different. Slowgirl traces a tentative, emotionally fraught encounter between a motormouth teenager and...
Stagestruck: History as a Living Weapon at Double Edge
A highlight of my summer theater season is always the magical change of pace afforded by Double Edge Theatre’s annual indoor/outdoor performance. This year, that peripatetic spectacle offers its own change of pace. Where previous seasons have given us captivating...
‘Hold These Truths’ Explores Japanese Internment During WWII
We (Sort Of) Hold These Truths When the U.S. ordered more than 100,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to relocate to internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942, Gordon Hirabayashi refused to listen. The son of Japanese immigrants and a...
Stagestruck: Animal Behavior – An Albee Prequel in Stockbridge
At the beginning of At Home at the Zoo, Ann appears from the kitchen and says to her husband Peter, “We have to talk.” Then they talk for an hour, and by the time Peter leaves their apartment to have a quiet read in Central Park, we know a lot more about him than we...
Stagestruck: Hitting the Nail – New Century’s heroic truths
I’ll get right to the point: Hold These Truths, at New Century Theatre, is possibly the most important play of the summer, with certainly one of the season’s most exhilarating performances. It’s not only searingly suggestive of our current national crisis, but is a...
Stagestruck: Gladrags and Ragtime at Shakespeare & Company
Intimate Apparel is all about fabrics. The silky fabrics draping the figures of elegant Gilded Age matrons and the coarser fabrics worn by their servants, delineating both economic and social standing. The deceptively comfortable fabrics covering the women’s corsets,...
Stagestruck: Taking Steps to Hilarity at Barrington Stage
The classic sex farce is set in a large room with about half a dozen doors, in and out of which pop guilty lovers, jealous spouses and other staples of the genre, and behind which most of the shenanigans real and suspected take place. Alan Ayckbourne’s classic Taking...
Stagestruck: Dancing on the Edge at Jacob’s Pillow With Akash Odedra
The two mainstage programs at Jacob’s Pillow dance festival last week offered intriguing contrasts in modern dance envelope-pushing. And perhaps surprisingly, it was the simpler, solo show that delivered more variety and excitement. Aakash Odedra is an Englishman of...
Whatever Happened To … Dog Sees God Looks at Peanuts Characters as Teens
Charlie Brown Would Be So Emo If you’ve ever wondered what happened to Good ‘ol Chuck, from the Peanuts comics, Gateway City Arts can fill you in; A week-long run of Bert V. Royal’s Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead begins Friday. Satirizing...
The Original Game of Thrones: Queen Margaret Takes Center Stage in Springfield/Turners
Queen Margaret, Historical Bad-Ass Before there was Game of Thrones and Cersei, there was the War of the Roses and Queen Margaret of Anjou. In fact, many people believe the hit HBO show was based on the War of the Roses, a 30-year war (of which Margaret was a key...
Stagestruck: Opposites Attract in Silverthorne’s Gentle Comedy
Chapatti, now playing at Silverthorne Theater Company, is one of the sweetest comedies about grief, loneliness and suicide I’ve ever seen. The title is unfortunate, even confusing, since Christian O’Reilly’s play takes place in Dublin, not Delhi, and the name has...
Stagestruck: Misfit Millennials – “Speech & Debate” at Barrington Stage
Reid Thompson’s setting for Speech & Debate, now receiving a near-perfect production at Barrington Stage Company, is a high school classroom. Maps and historical posters line the walls and headshots of famous Americans form a frieze above a pair of whiteboards –...
Stagestruck: Bare Bard at Shakespeare & Co., Cymbeline Reviewed
Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s “romances,” those late works in which comedy blends with tragedy and the endings are neither strewn with corpses nor aclang with wedding bells, but suffused with poignancy and forgiveness. The Tempest is the most popular...E-Edition
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