by Chris Rohmann | Jul 12, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Plays about Big Issues are often more issue than play. Too many are simply platforms for a message, their characters little more than representatives of situations or points of view. The Big Issue in Anna Ouyang Moench’s Birds of North America, at Chester Theatre...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 8, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage
The set in Barrington Stage Company’s ABCD is bisected by a hallway lined with lockers. It both connects and separates two city schools that are miles, and worlds, apart. May Treuhaft-Ali’s world-premiere play (her first professional production, in fact) is based on...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 7, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It must be a challenge to cast Once, the 2011 musical based on the 2007 film. The stage version calls for 13 performers who can sing, act and play an instrument, all of them to a high standard, plus do a passable Irish or Czech accent. I’m very happy to report that...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 5, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Code-switching is a term in linguistics that describes how people raised in two different cultures “switch” their use of language, and by extension behaviors, according to which milieu they’re in. These days, it applies particularly to people of color in a...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 2, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The Covid Era has been a bad-news/good-news time for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Bad news: On top of being shuttered by the pandemic, in late 2020 the Doris Duke Theatre, the company’s cozy second stage, burned to the ground in an unexplained fire. Last summer and...