Stagestruck
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 29, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
The dance companies that opened this year’s season at Jacob’s Pillow epitomize the festival’s enduring mission. This week the mainstage hosts Pilobolus, one of the pillars of modern dance and still innovating after 45 years. And in the Pillow’s intimate Doris Duke...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 25, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
Silverthorne Theater Company has come a long way since its founding five summers ago. Struggling at first with difficult venues and miniscule audiences, the company, under the leadership of Lucinda Kidder, is now celebrating the half-decade mark with a permanent home...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 23, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
Bar Mitzvah Boy is a comedy that looks seriously at faith, community, and loss. Its premise contains the seeds of sitcom: A middle-aged Jewish lawyer who hasn’t set foot in a synagogue since he was a boy is suddenly in a rush to have his way-overdue becoming-a-man...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 20, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
A six-week workshop for first-time playwrights taught by the Majestic Theater’s Danny Eaton has borne unexpected fruit. It has not only brought forth a full-length play, but has inspired Eaton to establish an annual “new works” week at the theater. Betel Arnold’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 18, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
Church & State is the funniest play about a serious issue I have ever seen. The issue is gun violence, specifically mass shootings, and the humor is threaded into the storyline so organically that, far from cheapening the theme, it lends to it a richer, more...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 15, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Stage, Stagestruck
The “royal family” of Broadway in the early 20th century was the Barrymores – Ethel, “first lady of the American theater,” John the swashbuckling Shakespearean, and Lionel, best remembered now as mean old Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. The hit Broadway comedy of...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 13, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Newsletter, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A theater story: For three years in the mid-’70s, Anthony Perkins starred in the long-running Broadway production of Equus, playing the psychiatrist Dr. Dysart (pause for Psycho jokes). Just before one matinee came an announcement: “Anthony Perkins will not be...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 13, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Newsletter, Stagestruck
Time was, summer theater was pretty predictable. Two comedies, a drama and a whodunit was the standard lineup when I was in summer stock way back in the day. Even the major venues — of which the Williamstown and Berkshire Theater Festivals were the grande dames —...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 12, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
If you’re a regular at the NT Live series of high-def broadcasts from the London stage, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rory Kinnear is under exclusive contract to the National Theatre. (He’s not, as you’ll know if you’re also a fan of the recent James Bond films, in...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 4, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two plays now running in Hartford are framed by resistance movements against political and economic oppression, and both carry weighty metaphors. At TheaterWorks through June 23, a lesson in global economics is tucked into a torn-from-the-headlines thriller, and at...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 1, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
I’m always excited as the summer-theater season approaches, even though it means I’ll be spending even more of my entertainment hours indoors than during the dark winter. In a brief three months, we theatergoers are treated to a greater variety of fare — not to...
by Chris Rohmann | May 30, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
Barrington Stage Company’s summer season launched on Sunday in the troupe’s St. Germain Stage, with a play by its eponym, Mark St. Germain. In her curtain speech, artistic director Julianne Boyd proudly announced that Typhoid Mary is the ninth play of his that...
by Chris Rohmann | May 16, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
“I think she may be the most singular, eccentric individual the Cold War ever birthed.” So says one of the three dozen characters in I Am My Own Wife. He’s talking about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, née Lothar Berfelde, Berlin’s most famous transvestite. In Doug Wright’s...
by Chris Rohmann | May 9, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Newsletter, Stagestruck
The Red Guitar, John Sheldon’s brilliant memoir-in-music, was a runaway hit at last summer’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Riding on its success in that international nexus of alternative arts, the show’s producer, the Valley’s Serious Play Theatre Ensemble, is taking it...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 23, 2018 | Articles, Featured, Newsletter, Stagestruck
The scene: desolation. The time: the aftermath of a cataclysm that has destroyed civilization and left only industrial scaffolding and piles of junk. Piles that include, let’s see, a bucketful of juggling clubs, a couple of unicycles, a teeter board and, oh yes, a...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 20, 2018 | Stagestruck
Julius Caesar is one of the most macho plays in Shakespeare’s male-heavy canon – only two women in the cast, both of them in and out before the thing is half over. But a new production puts many more women onstage, one of them in the play’s most macho role. Performed...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 18, 2018 | Articles, Stagestruck
Three shows up and down the Valley this weekend put a modern and feminist spin on some classic tales from Shakespeare and the Bible – Wayward Home in Ashfield, The Annotated *Taming* in Turners Falls and Julius Caesar in Amherst. Wayward Home, weaving the Noah’s Ark...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 18, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
The tattoo From the title, you might think The Tattooed Man Tells All is a memoir of life on the carnival circuit. It’s anything but. This man’s tat is a five-digit number that was etched into his forearm in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Peter Wortsman’s one-man...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 22, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 9, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 6, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 3, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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”...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 27, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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....
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 13, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 5, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Newsletter, Stagestruck
It’s Black History Month — or as African-American actors I know like to call it, “Black Employment Month” — the time of year when many theaters make a point of programming shows by and about people of color. Some scoff at the perceived tokenism, and it does point up...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 31, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 29, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck, Uncategorized
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 24, 2018 | Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 16, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Newsletter, Stagestruck
Time was, going to the theater took up the whole evening, with built-in pee and bar breaks. That’s been changing recently, as more and more plays clock in at an intermissionless 90 minutes or so. Back in Shakespeare’s day, of course, the show went on all afternoon,...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 26, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 11, 2017 | Articles, Columns, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 7, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
“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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 30, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 27, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 20, 2017 | Articles, Columns, Newsletter, Stagestruck
Crimes of the Heart is an American classic. Beth Henley’s 1980 play garnered a Tony, a Pulitzer and a movie deal, ran on Broadway for over a year and has been a community theater staple ever since. Before catching Cate Damon’s lively production at the Majestic Theater...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 14, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 8, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 5, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 1, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck, Uncategorized
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 30, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Stage, Stagestruck
“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....
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 19, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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....
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 16, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 9, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 3, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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,...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 20, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 18, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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 —...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 12, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 11, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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....
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 18, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 14, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 14, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 10, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 8, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 7, 2017 | Articles, Columns, Newsletter, Review, Stagestruck
Everyone needs something to live for. Some of us have a harder time finding it than others. Much harder. So … if you’re a young child and your mom has just tried to kill herself, what can you do about it? Well, you could give her a list of everything that makes the...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 3, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 3, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 1, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 31, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 28, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 27, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
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,...
