Theatre
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Fall Season of Boston's Modern Theatre
Tina Packer to Direct Shakespeare's Henry VIII
By: - Sep 07th, 2013The Modern Theatre at Suffolk University announces the programming lineup for its fall 2013 season, featuring innovative performances of dance, opera, and new and classic plays. Among other attractions Tina Packer, founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, will produce his rarely staged Henry V111.
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Wisconsin's American Players Theatre
Shakespeare Outdoors Through October 20
By: - Sep 06th, 2013This season, through October 20, the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin is presenting one of Shakespeare’s most revered tragedies, Hamlet. This production includes the full text and clocks in at three and a half hours with one 20 minute intermission. And they’ve made every single minute count!
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Beef and Boards Announces 2014 Season
Tasty Dinner Theater in Indianapolis
By: - Sep 06th, 2013Dinner theatre survives and thrives at Beef and Boards in Indianapolis. Our correspondent Melissa Hall covers the current offering of Father of the Bride a remake of the 119 film starring Steve Martin. It runs through September 29. The company posts its 2014 schedule
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A Dialogue with Creator/ Director Mary Zimmerman
Bringing Jungle Book from Chicago to Huntington Theatre Company
By: - Sep 03rd, 2013Launching the fall season of Boston's Huntington Theatre Company the renowned director and creator Mary Zimmerman returns with a new musical adapted from Kipling's The Jungle Book. Previously she directed the Leonard Bernstein musical Candide. Adding to an extensive prior dialogue we corresponded with Zimmerman about the new production which may be New York bound.
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Barrington Stage Jumps Gun on 2014 Season
Kiss Me Kate and St. Germain's Dancing Lessons
By: - Sep 03rd, 2013Barrington Stage Company announces two productions for the theater’s 20th Anniversary Season - Kiss Me, Kate the musical comedy masterpiece by composer Cole Porter and authors Sam and Bella Spewack and the world premiere romantic comedy Dancing Lessons by Mark St. Germain. The new play was well received during a staged reading over the holiday weekend.
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Shakespeare & Company Beauty Queens Two
Risk Taking Based on a 35 Year Legacy
By: - Sep 02nd, 2013There has been considerable risk taking in the 2013 season programmed by Shakespeare & Company artistic director Tony Simotes. It has combined rarely produced Shakespeare plays as well as tough works by Stoppard and Brecht. The season ends on September 15 with arguably the most controversial play of the Berkshire season Martin McDonagh's brutal dark comedy The Beauty Queen of Leenane. This is part two of a discussion with its cast members Tina Packer, Elizabeth Aspenlieder, David Sedgwick and Edmund Donovan.
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Chicago's Timeline Theatre's Raisin in the Sun
Hansberry's Play Lingers in the Imagination and Sadly in Reality
By: - Sep 01st, 2013Timeline takes brilliant advantage of its limitations to produce an irresistible staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic, A Raisin in the Sun. The play takes place in a family living room. We the audience are sitting there too, pressed up against the actors who seem more like family than stage presences as we join them.
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To Kill a Mockingbird at Weston Playhouse
Vermont Season Ends with Riveting Drama
By: - Aug 31st, 2013Fifty years after Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream Speech this production reminds us of our not-so-distant past and leaves us wondering how best to continue towards a just future. It continues at Vermont's Weston Playhouse through September 7.
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Anna Christie at Berkshire Theatre Group
O’Neill Play Washes Up in Stockbridge
By: - Aug 30th, 2013The Berkshire Theatre Group production of Eugene O'Neill's 1921 play Anna Christie has been given an extreme makeover by Pulitzer prize winning director David Auburn. The play has been condensed from four acts to two with the cast cut from ten to five characters. With these drastic reductions, while clear and cohesive, Auburn serves the steak without the sizzle.
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Meeting with the Beauty Queens of Leenane
Rocking the Boat at Shakespeare & Company Part One
By: - Aug 29th, 2013Tina Packer has been quoted in the media that she can't wait for the end of the run of Beauty Queen of Leenane at Shakespeare & Company on September 15. Audiences and critics agree that it is the most powerful and harrowing production of the Berkshire season. In part one of a meeting with the cast Packer exploded about why she hates the character she has been roped into portraying. Her Mag Folan reminds her of the two mother in laws she hated.
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Beauty Queen of Leenane at S&Co.
Brutal Play by Martin McDonagh Powerfully Presented
By: - Aug 23rd, 2013The Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is a brutal bastard to actors and the suffering audience. The Beauty Queen of Leenane at Shakespeare & Company is an evening of pure misery. But if you love great theatre don't miss four truly magnificent performances. It is also the first time that a national treasure, Tina Packer, has shared a stage with the phenomenal Elizabeth Aspenlieder.
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Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah
Barrington Stage Co-Premiere by Mark St. Germain
By: - Aug 22nd, 2013With two of the three original cast members- Joey Collins as F.Scott Fitzgerald and Angela Pierce as studio representative Miss Evelyn Montaigne, the play commissioned and premiered by the Contemporary American Theatre Festival has transferred from Shepherdstown, West Virginia to Barrington Stage. With the addition of Ted Koch as Hemingway "Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah" has been written and directed by Mark Saint Germain. It is being staged in the theatre which has been named for him.
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John Douglas Thompson on Brecht
Performing with Olympia Dukakis in Mother Courage
By: - Aug 21st, 2013This summer at Shakespeare & Company John Douglas Thompson has performed the supporting role of The Cook to have the chance to work with the 82--year-old Olympia Dukakis in Brecht's Mother Courage. This is a revised version of the original posting with further reflection on the unique challenges of performing a play by Brecht.
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John Douglas Thompson Cooks in Lenox
Booked for Productions Through 2015
By: - Aug 19th, 2013Since seeing John Douglas Thompson in Othello at Shakespeare & Company in 2008 we have tried to see and talk about all of his performances. We met for lunch in Pittsfield to catch up on what will be a fully booked schedule of plays through January , 2015. This entails two Broadway plays and an Off Broadway production.. Thompson is widely regarded as among the foremost theatrical actors of his generation. This is part one of the latest dialogue.
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Clybourne Park at Dorset Theatre Festival
A Co-Production with Barrington Stage Company
By: - Aug 19th, 2013The Pulitzer prize-winning play, Clybourne Park is a response to A Raisin in the Sun, the 1959 play of hope and change toward a better future for African Americans. Clybourne Park depicts a different perspective of the events of that play and a version of reality 50 years after those fictional events.
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Jamie Nabers Annie Bosh at Steppenwolf
First Look Series is First Rate Theater
By: - Aug 18th, 2013Jamie Nabers recently workshopped a musical at Williamstown and is a presence around the US.
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This Blessed Plot at Weston Theatre
Vermont Theatre's New Works Program
By: - Aug 17th, 2013The workshop production of This Blessed Plot will evolve throughout its two-week run which ends on September 1. Not yet in its final form, this play is not being reviewed, but offered as an opportunity to participate in the development of this dynamic one-man work-in-progress. The project is a part of the New Works Program of The Weston Theatre in Vermont.
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Jenny Gersten Solidifies WTF
Part Two Balancing Roles as CEO and Artistic Director
By: - Aug 16th, 2013As a producer, rather than director or actor, as was the case in recent years, Jenny Gersten approaches being artistic director of Williamstown Theatre Festival as a full time, year round job. Her role as CEO is as important to her as making the artistic decisions of planning a season. She describes enjoying fundraising and marketing because it is driven by her passion for one of America's most renowned regional theatre companies,
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Edith Freni's Buena Vista at Steppenwolf
A Good View, but a Dark One in Compelling Drama
By: - Aug 14th, 2013Playwright Edith Freni has been produced at Williamstown and almost every other important theater venue in this country. Steppenwolf's production of Buena Vista shows you why.
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Jenny Gersten on Williamstown Theatre Festival
Third Season Charms
By: - Aug 14th, 2013For her third season as artistic director of the Williamstown Theater Festival Jenny Gersten produced an amazing three musicals in a program of seven productions. Bridges of Madison County opens on Broadway in January but Gersten insists her mandate is to create shows for Williamstown. We met to discuss the season which ends this weekend. This is part one of that dialogue.
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Much Ado About Nothing at Barrington Stage
Julianne Boyd’s First Shakespeare Soars
By: - Aug 12th, 2013Following On the Town and the Chosen Barrington Stage ends its main stage season with yet another run away hit. Julianne Boyd charms and delights as producer/ director of the first ever attempt at Shakespeare his iconic comedy Much Ado Nothing. Barrington's mainstays Christopher Innvar and Gretchen Egolf soar to new heights as the feisty lovers Benedick and Beatrice. On every level from sets to costumes this is a gorgeous and hilarious seasonal treat.
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The Gospel of Franklin at Steppenwolf
Playwright Aaron Carter Tackles Fathers and Sons
By: - Aug 11th, 2013Gospel is good news and glad tidings. Aaron Carter’s fascinating play presented by Steppenwolf’s First Look program at first blush appears to be good news. But quickly, we see that it is complicated. There are two characters who bear tidings, Franklin the father, and his son William. William is trying to piece together his own life and at the same time discover his father, not as a story, but as the truth woven from bits and pieces of information he has received over time. They are not in chronological order, but in the order of his discovery.
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Mark St. Germain Discusses Scott and Hem
New Play for Barrington Stage Company
By: - Aug 09th, 2013A new play by Mark St. Germain "Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah" will run at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass from August 15 through September 29. It was commissioned for the Contemporary American Theatre Festival where we saw it earlier this summer in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. We met for breakfast to discuss changes for the still evolving play which is now in its eighth draft.
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Blood Play Wraps WTF Season
Schlock of the New
By: - Aug 09th, 2013The season ending Blood Play by the experimental The Debate Society takes place in the 1950s during an impromptu cocktail party in the renovated, pine paneled basement of a newly settled suburban Jewish couple. Their traumatized son Ira is living in a tent in the back yard. This may be the most controversial and "debated" play of the Williamstown Theatre Festival season.
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The Bridges of Madison County in Williamstown
World Premiere of Marsha Norman/ Jason Robert Brown Musical
By: - Aug 07th, 2013With daily notes, rewrites, cuts and rehearsals the world premiere of the musical Bridge of Madison County will be quite different by the time in ends its run at the Williamstown Theatre Festival on August 18. After a layover to solidify the changes of this production it will go into rehearsal with a Broadway opening in January. While clearly a work in progress we enjoyed much of what we saw. Hopefully it will hit the ground running in New York.
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