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Fences in South Florida
August Wilson Masterpiece at Palm Beach Dramaworks
By: - Apr 11th, 2019Talented, veteran actor delivers a towering, multifaceted performance as Troy Maxson in Fences. Palm Beach Dramaworks' production of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play is riveting. Fences, which takes place in 1957, is part of August Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle" or "American Century Cycle."
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Norma Jeane Baker of Troy at The Shed
Ben Whishaw and Renee Fleming Star
By: - Apr 10th, 2019Poet Anne Carson has a special touch, embedding a conversational tone in lilting lines. While Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is billed as a melologue in which some words are sung and some spoken. It asks the question opera composers always ask: what words should be spoken, and what words sung? As a struggling writer's secretary, Fleming becomes muse, moving from speech to song. She is glorious. So too is Ben Whishaw, who moves from writer to the embodiment of Marilyn Monroe.
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Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptation
At Broadway's Imperial Theatre
By: - Apr 10th, 2019I wish that I could say that Ain’t Too Proud turned me inside out and sent me directly to heaven. But if the truth be told the first act is a painful 30 minutes too long, and Dominique Morisseau’s mechanically written fact-filled book based on the group’s original founder Otis William’s 1988 memoir – lots of "I did that and he did that and then we all did that" – is as engaging as bad coffee and a failed omelet on a gray day.
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Kill the Debbie Downers!
Based on Chekov at Ashby Stage
By: - Apr 09th, 2019Although the central plot line in Kill the Debbie Downers! is linear, the play changes tone, direction, time, and place frequently, resulting in a sense of mental chaos. But for those who can appreciate leaving a performance with more questions than answers, this is a fulfilling experience.
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Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish
Language Roots the Musical in its Native Soil
By: - Apr 08th, 2019Directer Joel Grey delivers a rare and rich revival. Fiddler on the Roof has come back, a comment and conversation in Yiddish about a time and place that indeed did shake the world. In the language of the people who lived it, this production is more rooted in their world, earthy, funny, deeply-moving.
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SOWA in Springtime
April Exhibitions
By: - Apr 08th, 2019During a week in Boston we attended the First Friday gallery openings in SOWA the Harrison Avenue based gallery district. It proved to be a lively adventure catching up with so many artist and gallerist friends
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Twelfth Night By William Shakespeare
Co Production of Lyric Stage and Actor’s Shakespeare Project
By: - Apr 08th, 2019Start with a shipwreck and twins tossed up far apart on a beach. Each assumes the other to have drowned. Add a bit of gender bending and a gaggle of outlandish characters and fools. Stage a bit of slapstic and add a welter of romantic subplots. Set it in New Orleans and serve Twelth Night as a spicy hot gumbo. From now to April 28 at Boston's Lyric Stage.
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Jeremy Gill and Port Mande at National Sawdust
Genre-breaking jazz to Contemporary Classical
By: - Apr 08th, 2019Mark Dover and Jeremy Ajari Jordan worked Debussy, Schubert and angst into a wild evening of jazz. Jeremy Gill has a quiet about his work from which he builds and to which he then retreats. There is something satisfying in this bracket, in which we share in the rougher emotions of the interior.
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Artist Arthur Polonsky at 93
Last of the Boston Expressionists
By: - Apr 07th, 2019With the passing of Arthur Polonsky (June 6, 1925 - April 4, 2019) the last link to the greatest generation of Boston artists has been broken. They are known and somewhat misrepresented as The Boston Expressionists.
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The Cradle Will Rock at Classic Stage Company
Marc Blitzstein Delivered for Our Times
By: - Mar 30th, 2019Marc Blitzstein was a critic of the music and politics of his time. Often expressing his dissatisfaction with the “privileged society” he felt dominated the creative impulses of his colleagues. As he wrote in 1936, “the unconscious (sometimes not so unconscious) prostitution of composers in today’s world is one of the sorry sights,” warning that “music in society, with us these many years, is dying of acute anachronism; and that a fresh idea, overwhelming in its implications and promise, is taking hold.” Prostitution, the exchange of one’s body for payment, became an important symbol for Blitzstein during the interwar period. It was a brash allegory for capitalism’s influence over (and failure of) the working class throughout the Great Depression.
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Today It Rains
Composed by Laura Kaminsky Libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed
By: - Mar 30th, 2019Maestra Nichole Paiement conducts the chamber orchestra to its polished sound with energy and precision, finding a visual and aural expressiveness in the combining of the instruments, parallel to that of Georgia O’Keeffe combining her paints. Laura Kaminsky honors this great artist with her world premiere opera Today It Rains, commissioned and presented by Opera Parallèle.
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Choir of King's College at Saint Thomas
Lenten Season Music
By: - Mar 29th, 2019Concerts at Saint Thomas continue their 2018-19 season with a guest performance by the acclaimed Choir of King’s College, Cambridge at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. This marks the choir’s final North American tour with current Director of Music Stephen Cleobury, who will retire after 37 years in September. His position will be filled by current Saint Thomas Organist and Director of Music Daniel Hyde.
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Lyric Stage Company of Boston
Announces 45th Season
By: - Mar 29th, 2019Lyric Stage Company of Boston announces its 45th season. The program of seven plays starts with a yet to be announced award winning musical from August 30 to October 6. The suspense is brutal.
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Reconnecting: MCLA Alumni Show
At Gallery 51 in North Adams
By: - Mar 29th, 2019The current exhibition at Gallery 51 “Reconnecting: MCLA Alumni Show” is eclectic, fun, and here and there, somewhat whimsical
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The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini
Sam Mendes Directs at Park Avenue Armory
By: - Mar 28th, 2019In a co-production with National Theatre and Neal Street Productions, the Park Avenue Armory is presenting a multi-generational story of the Bavarian family Lehman in America. Captivated by Ben Powers' Biblical translation of Stefano Massini's The Lehman Trilogy, director Sam Mendes has worked with three brilliant actors to create a cast of hundreds. It is a testimony to the talents of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles that we believe one man can be a young woman, a child, and an aging patriarch if not all at once, certainly standing next to each other.
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Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival
2019 Festival September 26 through 29
By: - Mar 26th, 2019The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival will offer a round trip charter bus for New York patrons. The 2019 Festival program (Sept. 26 – 29) will feature plays by Tennessee Williams and the provocative Japanese author Yukio Mishima.
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Huntington Theatre Company
Lineup of the 2019-2020 Season
By: - Mar 26th, 2019Huntington Theatre Company announces the lineup of the 2019-2020 season, featuring three world premieres, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, a classic Tony Award-winning comedy by one of the world’s most celebrated playwrights, and two adaptations of powerful literary works.
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From White Plains
Comedy-Drama About the Past and Bullying
By: - Mar 25th, 2019Michael Perlman's From White Plains examines the effects of bullying decades after one's school days. Cast members largely shine in a South Florida regional production of this comedic drama. The play's characters are unable to escape the past in From White Plains. The set's centerpiece, which resembles a prison cell's gate, symbolizes this.
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John Hochheimer on WBUR 1968 to 1971
Progressive Programming Terminated by John Silber
By: - Mar 25th, 2019Now retired, professor John Hochheimer of Southern Illinois University, recalls undergraduate years at Boston University’s then progressive station WBUR. He started as a high school volunteer in New York at WBAI. During sophomore year at BU, in 1968, he started at WBUR. He was influenced by the free form programming of Tom Gamache, AKA Uncle T. Rock archivist, David Bieber, was a friend and flat mate. He once spent five hours on air with David Bowie and became friends with B.B. King and Elton John. The programming staff was fired not long after John Silber took over at BU in 1971.
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John Guare’s Nantucket Sleigh Ride
At Lincoln Center in New York
By: - Mar 25th, 2019Nantucket Sleigh Ride by John Guare is a revised version of an earlier play, Are You There, McPhee?, produced at McCarter Theatre at Princeton in 2012. It’s a farce, a puzzle and a jumble of pop culture references with a lot of laughs, and may leave you feeling unglued.
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Richard II at DeSotelle Studios
C.A.G.E Commited to Shakespeare Realized
By: - Mar 24th, 2019DeSotelle Studios is committed to doing staged readings of eight Shakespeare plays in eight months. Richard II seems perfect for this form. Perhaps no Shakespeare play rests more securely in its lyric laurels. Rhymed couplets and parallel constructions abound for listening pleasure. The cast took full advantage under Katrin Hilbe's direction.
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To Kill a Mockingbird
At the Shubert Theater
By: - Mar 23rd, 2019Aaron Sorkin received permission from author Harper Lee before she died in 2016. However, when Tonja Carter whom Lee had named as her personal representative, learned of some of the changes lawsuits ensued. Eventually the matter was settled.
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Popular Artists at Tanglewood
Adding Three New Acts to Full Season
By: - Mar 23rd, 2019The 2019 Popular Artist Series includes performances by Brian Wilson (6/16), Richard Thompson (6/21), Earth, Wind & Fire (6/28), Josh Groban (7/2), James Taylor and his All-Star Band (7/3 & 4), Train and the Goo Goo Dolls (8/5), Gladys Knight and The Spinners (8/28), Squeeze—The Squeeze Songbook Tour (8/29), Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo and Melissa Etheridge (8/30), Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue (8/31), and Reba McEntire (9/1). American Public Media’s Live From Here with Chris Thile also returns on June 15, opening the 2019 season.
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Skinnamarink at New York Theater Workshop
Little Lord Skewers US Education with Style
By: - Mar 23rd, 2019Little Lord transforms the Fourth Street Theater of New York Theater Workshop into a one room schoolhouse. We the audience get to face the demons of our early education where "Run Dick Run" at the very least bored us to tears. Based on the educational theories of William McGuffey, who after roaming the midwest as an itinerant teacher, created elementary readers for grades one to six, McGuffey's texts were used throughout the US for a hundred years.
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Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall
Thomas Adès Conducts
By: - Mar 22nd, 2019Although the first conductors were themselves composers, the wearing of both hats at the helm of a symphony orchestra is always cause for comment. On Wednesday night, the British composer Thomas Adès, who is currently in the new role of "Artistic Partner" with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led that band at Carnegie Hall in a program featuring the New York debut of his Piano Concerto.
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