Stagestruck
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 22, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
I often write in these pages about theater at the Five Colleges, all of which have robust degree programs and busy production seasons. But I don’t pay as much attention to the Valley’s other academic theaters as they deserve, and I’m going to partially correct that...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 21, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
These are precarious days, observes Peter Schumann, founder and director of Bread & Puppet Theater. The social order, the democratic contract and the earth itself are tottering from unprecedented stresses. Bread & Puppet’s Diagonal Life: Theory and Praxis,...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 17, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It’s the Bard’s birthday next week, and three shows on area stages are celebrating it. (Shakespeare’s actual birthdate is unknown, but it was sometime around April 23, 1564, and since he died on April 23, 1616, that symmetry has become traditional.) This weekend and...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 10, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two plays coming to area campuses this week and next have starkly different, but equally pessimistic takes on life and death. Death of a Salesman, at Springfield College, finds tragedy in an ordinary life, while The Tattooed Man Tells All, at Smith College, draws...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 9, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
There’s a new theater company in the Valley, with a kick-ass name and no less a purpose than helping to “undo established hierarchical structures and their attendant damage.” It’s called Strident Theatre, and its vociferous founder is actor/director/playwright Susanna...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 5, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
My brother is the world’s biggest P.G. Wodehouse fan. Well, maybe not the biggest — he’s got legions of competitors for that title — but big enough to have come up from his home in New Jersey to accompany me to the American premiere of a new Wodehouse-derived play....
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 4, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In 1994, Stacy Klein moved her adventurous company, Double Edge Theatre, from Boston to a former dairy farm in rural Ashfield, and started milking the Muse. A quarter-century later, the 100-acre spread is home to a resident company of artists and a hub of visceral,...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 1, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two of the Five Colleges’ season-ending productions, both by award-winning women playwrights, hark back to moments in recent history that continue to reverberate. One takes place in a remote backwater, the other in the industrial heartland, but they share themes of...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 25, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Greetings from Toronto, where it’s still winter, the wind whipping in from Lake Ontario is keen and bracing, and so is the theater. I’ve seen two plays here, a one-man show and an eight-woman show, both of them the work of bi-cultural authors, performed in key venues...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 19, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Eight people are seated in a semi-circle at a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous. They are actually actors in a play, but though they’re not the recovering addicts they portray, each of them has a real-life connection to the nation’s — and the Valley’s — opioid crisis....
