★★☆☆☆ 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 […]
HAROLD WHO? JENNIFER ELLIS SHINES IN THE MUSIC MAN
★★★☆☆ Reagle Music Theatre occupies a vital place in the cultural ecosystem of the Greater Boston Area: It’s the only place you’re likely to see a classic musical with a full orchestra and a cast of more than 50. I love the way that Reagle evokes the summer stock tradition and presents golden […]
JUST A LITTLE TOUCH OF STAR QUALITY: JARED REINFELDT SHINES IN GEORGIA MCBRIDE
★★★★☆ If the idea of a play filled with snarky references to Gypsy, the Von Trapp family, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof sounds like something right up your alley, then there’s a hell of a good time waiting for you at Stoneham’s Greater Boston Stage Company. But if the name Frances […]
A GRIPPING GUARDS AT THE TAJ AT CENTRAL SQUARE THEATER
★★★★☆ Rajiv Joseph’s alluringly original 2015 play Guards at the Taj is being given a stellar production at Central Square Theater, courtesy of Underground Railway Theater and director Gabriel Vega Weissman. It seems that Joseph, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his 2010 Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, has drawn some inspiration […]
