Theatre
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Legacy by Daniel Goldfarb at Williamstown
World Premiere with Hecht, Bogosian, Long and Feiffer
By: - Jul 04th, 2015The new Williamstown Theatre Festival artistic director, Mandy Greenfield, has launched her tenure with a double header of world premieres. In the smaller Nikos Stage a fine cast is performing Legacy by Daniel Goldfarb. There are tons of laughs and then it gets very grim and dark.
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William Inge’s Off the Main Road
Rediscovered Play at Williamstown Theatre Festival
By: - Jul 03rd, 2015Among works in the estate of the Tony and Pulitzer winning playwright, William Inge, was a 1966 teleplay now reconfigured for stage and having its world premiere as Off the Main Road at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Directed by Evan Cabnet it stars Emmy winner Kyra Sedgwick as Faye the battered, alcoholic wife of Manny (Jeremy Davidson) a now abusive, alcoholic former baseball star.
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Come From Away at La Jolla Playhouse
By Irene Sankoff and David Hein
By: - Jun 29th, 2015The musical “Come From Away” by the Canadian husband-and wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein, directed by Ashley made its World Premiere debut at the Sheila and Hughes Poitier Theatre last weekend to thunderous applause and standing ovations.
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The Who and the What at Victory Gardens
Play by Ayad Akhtar in Chicago
By: - Jun 29th, 2015The Who and the What is a smart, funny play about a conservative Pakistani-American family and their attempts to come to grips with modern realities while maintaining respect for tradition. Playwright Ayad Akhtar has written believable characters who fight articulately about what they believe in.
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Bad Jews by Joshua Harmon
New Comedy at Geffen Playhouse in LA Until July 19
By: - Jun 29th, 2015“Bad Jews” is a new modern comedy written by acclaimed young playwright Joshua Harmon. The ambiguously titled and talky play currently on stage at the Geffen Playhouse is directed by Matt Shakman, who helms his production with one directorial foot planted in “tradition” and the other directorial foot solidly rooted in the secular 21st century.
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Intimate Apparel at Dorset Theatre Festival
Vermont's Dorset Makes a Bold Choice for Season Opener
By: - Jun 27th, 2015This is superb production of a beautifully written play that looks at the lives of African-American women in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a bold opener for Vermont’s Dorset Theatre Festival season. An uptown white socialite, a downtown black prostitute, and a self-deprecating Jewish cloth salesman are just three of the disparate characters who populate the world of Esther, a hard-working and humble black woman who makes her living fashioning ladies’ intimate apparel.
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Henry V at Shakespeare & Company
Ryan Winkles Triumphant in Title Role
By: - Jun 27th, 2015The cycle of history plays by Shakespeare continues and unfortunately ends this season with a chamber production of the ever popular Henry V. This scaled back drama with four male and four female actors playing multiple roles has been directed by Jenna Ware. In the title role Ryan Winkles is magnificent. It adds another dimension to a superb actor who previously has been featured in comic roles.
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Beckett's Happy Days is Here Again at the Flea
Brooke Adams and Tony Shalhoub Capture the Absurdity
By: - Jun 25th, 2015This production was a smash hit in Pasadena before it arrived at the Flea in New York and why is very clear: Brooke Adams gives a tour de force performance as Winnie, sinking into the earth with a broad grin. Her husband Tony Shalhoud is Willie: farting, eating goobers, but loving all the time..
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Moby Dick at Lookingglass
New Production Adapted from Melville's Novel
By: - Jun 23rd, 2015Lookingglass's black box theater in the old Water Works on Michigan Avenue in Chicago becomes the interior of a great whale with steel hoops extending from stage rear to the top of the theater.
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Conor McPherson's Shining City at Barrington Stage
Irish Drama Features Mark H. Dold as Priest Turned Therapist
By: - Jun 22nd, 2015The title Shining City is a Bliblical reference that "A town built on a hill cannot be hidden." But there is much that is obscure and repressed in this drama by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson.
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Thoreau or, Return to Walden
David Adkins Bonkers in the Woods
By: - Jun 21st, 2015If you have read Walden and think you know Henry David Thoreau guess again. The world premiere Thoreau or Return to Walden written by and starring David Adkins, directed by Eric Hill presents the New England transcendentalist and abolitionist as an eccentric just short of lunacy.
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Heisenberg with Mary Louise Parker
Simon Stephens Brings Quantum Entanglement to Life
By: - Jun 20th, 2015Heisenberg is a dashing new play by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog, a hit on Broadway. His new play is more complete and satisfying, although its subject might disturb people who need predictability and order. Certainly Mary Louise Parker doesn't, as she loosey-goosey's through her life. Don't be put off by hints of quantum physics in the title. The play is uproarious and the best take on a May-December romance you'll see. It begins with a kiss, passes through the usual, and ends with indeterminacy.
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The Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon Continues Series C
Love in Many Surprising Forms
By: - Jun 19th, 2015The EST, play after play, performance after performance, delivers first rate productions of new playwrights. The EST is of the most exiting companies in New York, or anywhere.
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Monteverdi Trilogy Heads to the Berkshires
Early Music Festival Travels to Great Barrington
By: - Jun 18th, 2015Every two years the Boston Early Music Festival schedules a week of concerts and operas that make Boston the world capital of early music. This year's focus was on Claudio Monteverdi, the first great opera composer. All three of his surviving operas were given stylish productions and featured some of the best singers of early music in the world. Taken from Greek myth and ancient Roman history, the stories resonate with the lives we live today.
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New Country at Cherry Lane Theatre in NYC
Intimate Show Makes a Big Noise
By: - Jun 16th, 2015The good news is that the edgy. enticing New Country, due to popular demand, has been extended to June 27 at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City. It is good enough to see twice. This is the kind of show that comes along every once in awhile. Presented by Fair Trade Productions in association with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, and written by Mark Roberts this is a must see production.
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Man of La Mancha Thrills at Barrington Stage
Jeff McCarthy in a Career Defining Performance
By: - Jun 15th, 2015When Jeff McCarthy brings down the house with an iconic barnburner The Impossible Dream it is richly evident that the fifty-year-old musical Man of La Mancha still packs a whallop that can blow the socks off of an audience. This Barrington Stage production that launches the Mainstage of Barrington Stage in Pittsfield is the benchmark hit of the still new 2015 Berkshire theatre season. It is doubtful that any actor will match or surpass his performance as the male lead in a musical.
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Gilbert Conducts Joan of Arc at the Stake
Marion Cotilliard Simply Magnificent as Joan
By: - Jun 13th, 2015The North American continent does not have military heroines. A 17th century Mexican nun, Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, was censored for her apostatic writings, but never picked up a sword. Without queens and saints, we have struggled into modern times. For comfort when France was challenged, as it often has been in history, the country looks to its patron saint, Joan of Arc, who helped end the Hundred Years War before she was burned at the stake. The New York Philharmonic reminded us of her trials in the ineffably moving composition of Paul Claudel and Arthur Honegger.
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Harold Pinter's Betrayal
The North Coast Repertory Theatre to June 28
By: - Jun 13th, 2015The North Coast Repertory Theatre’s potent production of marriage infidelity and betrayal is full of clever directorial touches, like the timing of Pinteresque pauses and the overall pacing between the excellent ensemble cast of Carla Harting, Jeffrey Frace, and Richard Baird, with Benjamin Cole contributing as a pompous and frustrated European waiter.
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Everybody's Talking World Premiere
Harry Nilsson Based Musical at San Diego Repertory Theatre
By: - Jun 09th, 2015“Everybody’s Talkin’” is more of a free-flowing musical tribute than a traditional book musical. There isn’t one line of scripted dialogue spoken by the performers. It’s just the genius of Harry Nilsson who was a poet/philosopher and a reluctant troubadour performer, whose songs lend themselves to the inspired arrangements by Gunderson and the staging by Velasco that propel the show along.
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After All The Terrible Things I Do At Calderwood
Self-Loathing and Acceptance Emotionally Wrestle
By: - Jun 05th, 2015What makes ordinary people do terrible things? Daniel, a young, gay aspiring writer, seeks a fresh start and a new job at the local bookstore that he loved as a child. When he meets Linda, the Filipina-American bookshop owner, they discover a connection that goes deeper than a love of literature. Artistic Director Peter DuBois directs the New England premiere of A. Rey Pamatmat’s at times gripping and intimate new play about changing attitudes, forgiveness and second chances.
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The Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon
Existential Questions Dramatic and Personal
By: - Jun 05th, 2015The Ensemble Studio Theatre just won a 2015 Drama Desk Award its commitment to producing new works by American playwrights since 1968. This year's 35th Marathon of Short Plays shows why the award is so deserved.
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Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival
Tenn Annual Festival September 24 to 27
By: - Jun 03rd, 2015The 10th anniversary Festival will take place in various venues in the seaside village of Provincetown from Thursday, September 24 through Sunday, September 27, 2015. The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival was founded in 2006 in the birthplace of American Modern Theater where Williams worked on many of his major plays during the 1940s. The TW Festival is the nation’s largest performing arts festival dedicated to celebrating and expanding the understanding of America’s great playwright.
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Fugard Theatre's A Human Being Died that Night
Truth and Reconciliation at the BAM Fisher
By: - Jun 03rd, 2015Both Plato and Aristotle wrote about the catharsis of tragedy in drama. South Africa with some success took the idea and tried to find truth and healing post apartheid. In large measure they succeeded. This wonderful play, conceived by Eric Abraham and written by Nicholas Wright, suggests why in a personal and incredibly moving adaptation of a true story.
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The How and the Why at S&Co.
Going With the Flow
By: - May 31st, 2015After a brutal winter on ever level Shakespeare & Company has launched the season with an intense and absorbing two hander The How and the Way by dramatist Sarah Treem. It stages a tense meeting between two brilliant women and scientists. A seething graduate student Rachel (Bridget Sacarino) has just learned the identify of her birth mother Zelda (Rod Randolph) a renowned scholar. By coincidence and one of many impossibilities the women are remarkably alike and even share the same field of evolutionary biology. If you can get beyond that unlikely twist of fate and other absurd literary devices this is an absorbing evening of tense and spellbinding theatre with superb performances by two fine actresses.
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A.R.Gurney's What I Did Last Summer
Jim Simpson Directs at the Signature
By: - May 28th, 2015What I Did Last Summer is A.R. Gurney's latest play and a delight. How could it be a dream summer at the beach when Dad is off fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, Mom is lonely, Elsie is trying to lose weight and Charlie is trying to become a man without a model around? Yet it is as directe by Jim Simpson
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