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 | 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 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....