★★★★★ Putting a new twist on the age-old trope of the mean but secretly insecure queen bee and her gaggle of devoted followers, Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play is currently receiving its New England premiere in a SpeakEasy Stage production directed by Summer L. Williams. This production, […]
THEATER REVIEW: VIETGONE AT COMPANY ONE THEATRE
★★★★☆ One of the many things I’ve learned while reviewing theater in Boston over the last several years is that if a production is bold, exciting, and makes me feel alive, chances are it’s a Company One production. Even the imperfect productions—and there are almost as many at C1 as there are […]
THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART AT APOLLINAIRE THEATRE
★★★★☆ It may be that no local theater company does weird as well as Apollinaire, and Danielle Fauteux Jacques’s atmospheric and good-natured production of David Greig’s bizarre The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is another strange feather in their one-of-a-kind cap. Immersively staged in a Scottish pub on the Scottish borders (also […]
THE CHOICE MAY HAVE BEEN MISTAKEN: ONEGIN AT GREATER BOSTON STAGE COMPANY
★★☆☆☆ That Eugene Onegin (both the Pushkin poem and the Tchaikovsky opera) would be considered a tale ripe for musical theaterization is not all that surprising. Oozing with romance and the ache of lost love, there are a great many innately dramatic things about the rise and fall of a cocky Russian playboy […]
SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING NEW: SHAKESPEARE’S ROMEO AND JULIET AT HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY
★★★★★ Walking into the Huntington Avenue Theatre to take your seat at its current production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, you might be reminded of your middle school field trip to the United Nations. You might also remember the American Repertory Theater’s recent staging of Othello, where TV screens and army barracks aimed […]
THEIR SILENT FACES: BOSTON THEATER COMPANY PREVIEWS MOVE YOUR FACE
★★★☆☆ Boy meets girl, boy dates girl, boy marries girl, boy loses girl. Tale as old as time, really. And while the old-fashioned courtship at the center of Move Your Face seems a dime a dozen and almost hardly worth dramatizing, the way that director and co-creator Joey Frangieh and company tell […]
THE FUTURE BECOMES THE PRESENT: THE GLASS MENAGERIE AT BOSTON CHILDREN’S THEATRE
★★☆☆☆ If you asked me to come up with a list of, say, 50 plays that should be performed by a children’s theater, nothing by Tennessee Williams would make that list. It isn’t only because of the material, that weighty, stifling, angry, desperate, liquor-soaked material, but also because the dynamics of the […]
THE UNIMAGINABLE BEAUTY OF ONCE AT SPEAKEASY STAGE
★★★★★ No modern musical captures the essence of tender love quite like Once, the Academy Award-winning sleeper hit film of 2007 that was adapted for the stage in 2012, sweeping that year’s Tony Awards. It isn’t only the lightning-in-a-bottle romance at the core of Once that has spellbound audiences for over a […]
SEEDS OF MISTRUST IN A.R.T.’S OTHELLO
★★★★☆ Othello, William Shakespeare’s quintessential tale of race-baiting political treachery, has more connections to contemporary society than one might care to admit (or write down). As observed in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production, now in performance at the American Repertory Theater, the story of a virtuous black leader brought down by the vindictive […]
THE END OF TV, LIVE AND IN COLOR
★★★★☆ The demise of television, it appears, happened before the medium even began. The End of TV, a multimedia theater piece mounted by the Manual Cinema troupe, filters shadow puppets, cardboard cutouts, and good old-fashioned pantomime through live cameras to depict the alienating effects of a consumer culture gone terribly wrong. The […]
