Theatre
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Jungle Book in Final Week
Just Eight More Performances at Huntington Theatre Company
By: - Oct 15th, 2013On October 8 we attended the 100th performance of the boffo, smash hit Jungle Book a stunning fantasy driven musical created and directed by Mary Zimmerman based on the book by Rudyard Kipling. This is the last chance to see a show destined to run forever on Broadway.
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Lorenzo Pisoni at LA's Mark Taper Forum
One Man Show Humor Abuse
By: - Oct 15th, 2013The current production on the boards of LA’s Mark Taper Forum is a clever and highly imaginative little gem of a show dealing with the world of clowns entitled “Humor Abuseâ€. It is brilliantly performed by professional clown and actor Lorenzo Pisoni and is winningly directed by co-creator Erica Schmidt.
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Les Mis at Beef and Boards
Serving a Meaty Jean Valjean
By: - Oct 15th, 2013The ambitious Beef and Boards Dinner Theatre in Indianapolis is serving a piping hot version of the spectacular musical Les Miserables. Our correspondent Melissa Hall files a tasty report.
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Jenny Gersten Leaving Williamstown Theatre Festival
To Run Friends of The High Line in New York
By: - Oct 15th, 2013Meeting to recap the third and final year of her contract as Artistic Director of Williamstown Theatre Festival Jenny Gersten was coy when I asked what comes next.? Now we know. Gersten is leaving Williamtown for NY's High Line. But she is planning and will help execute next summer's WTF program assuring an orderly transition during the search for a new Artistic Director. There have been three in the past nine years. Who will be the next three and out?
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Clybourne Park at Barrington Stage to Oct. 13
Coming Too Soon to a Theatre Near You
By: - Oct 05th, 2013The Pulitzer and Tony winning Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris is currently on the short list of most produced plays in America. In a co production with Dorset Theatre Festival where it was staged his summer it runs through October 13 at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield. This is its fifth review for Berkshire Fine Arts.
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A.R.T & Moscow Art Theatre Schedule
Advanced Theater Training Productions for the 2013/14 Season.
By: - Sep 25th, 2013The American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training announce the productions for the 2013/14 Season. From October 11 through May 30 in Cambridge, Mass.
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All The Way Powerful At American Rep
LBJ's Political and Personal Dilemmas Poetically Told
By: - Sep 20th, 2013Lyndon Johnson was one of our most provocative and contradictory presidents. A Southerner who tried to wipe out racial prejudice, a compromiser who only wanted to get his own way and a flawed individual who tried to make America a perfect union. All The Way is a Shakespearean drama that tells the story of the first year of LBJ's presidency with brilliant performances by Bryan Cranston as Johnson as well as by a host of supporting actors. It is a superb story of politics on the precipice and how compromise and cooperation by any means achieves political ends. It is a story set half a century ago that is a lesson for our own politically absurd times.
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Jungle Book Stunning At Huntington Theatre
A Visual and Musical Multigenerational Event
By: - Sep 19th, 2013Based upon Rudyard Kipling's early 20th Century children's classic, The Huntington Theatre Company's inaugeral show of the 2013-14 Season is a tour de force of music, visuals and performances. This production is a show for the whole family that will delight everyone's inner child as well as their outer adult. It is light and airy and full of beauty and vitality. This Jungle Book is a visual stunner with theatrical panache. And the character Mowgli is performed with such charisma that it is astounding. Director/Creator Mary Zimmerman's interpretation of this classic is magnificent and triumphant. Move over Lion King.
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Jungle Book at Huntington Theatre Extended
Final Performance Now October 20
By: - Sep 18th, 2013Due to popular demand, the Huntington Theatre Company again extends the run of its world premiere adaptation of The Jungle Book – the final performance will now be Sunday, October 20. The “inventive and visually stunning†(Entertainment Weekly) production officially opens tonight, Wednesday, September 18 at 7pm at the Huntington’s mainstage, the Boston University Theatre.
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Tribes Brilliantly Speaks At SpeakEasy Stage
An Eloquent Hearing and Listening Experience
By: - Sep 15th, 2013Tribes is a brilliantly written play by Nina Raine that had its world premiere in 2010 at London's Royal Court Theatre. It tells the story of an overtly intellectual British family with a son who is deaf and his two hearing siblings. The deaf son Billy was purposely raised without knowledge of sign language. After meeting Sylvia, a hearing woman born to deaf parents who is now slowly going deaf herself, his interaction with her reveals the prejudices, beliefs, and hierarchies of his family. Here, hearing and listening are illustrated to be quite different. This may be one of the best dramas of the 2013-2014 season anywhere.
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ArtsEmerson: The World On Stage
Announces 2014 Season
By: - Sep 10th, 2013ArtsEmerson: The World On Stage announces the second half of its fourth theatre season, beginning in early 2014. This covers productions into June of 2014. Rob Orchard, Executive Director for the Arts stated that "Our fourth season offers world premieres, classics, return visits from friends we've hosted before, and dialogue around important historical moments as well as a number of works featuring multi-media and music. In short, a world on stage coming to us this year from Belgium, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, England, Israel, The Netherlands, Russia and across the U.S."
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American Repertory Theatre 2013-14 Season
Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston as LBJ
By: - Sep 10th, 2013American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) has scheduled American Sign Language (ASL) interpreted performances and Audio Described performances for blind and low-visioned audiences during the A.R.T.’s 2013-14 Season. Bryan Cranston the star of the hit TV drama Breaking Bad plays President Lyndon B. Johnson in All The Way which opens the season in Cambridge on October 1.
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Jane Austen's Persuasion at Chicago Chamber Opera
Barbara Landis's Production in NY September 14 & 15
By: - Sep 09th, 2013Barbara Landis found Jane Austen’s language so perfect that she appropriated it as lyrics. Persuasion is set in music she plucked from the period in which Austen wrote. Landis, an assembler among her many talents, refers to this enterprise as a “mishmash.†We review the Chicago production which will be performed at Dicapo Opera Theatre, New York City , September 14 and 15.
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One Man, Two Guvnors At Lyric Stage
British Comedy Based On 18th Century Italian One
By: - Sep 09th, 2013Last year, this show was a hit on Broadway after great runs in London and throughout the UK. Apparently, the energy and rhythm of the Broadway production and talented lead James Corden made this show a crowd pleaser. For his performance Cordon won a Tony. His physical humor is a hard act to follow. One Man, Two Govnors is billed as a celebration of British comedy. Rather than, as expected a laugh-out-loud mix of satire, songs and slapstick, this Lyric Stage Company production takes a rather long time to develop its form. However, there are a few standout performances that make it worth the price of admission.
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Berkshire Theatre Highlights 2013
Reflecting on an Intense High Season
By: - Sep 09th, 2013With several major Berkshire arts organizations now closed until next year it's time to reflect on the intense and often remarkable 2013 high season. It's impossible to be everywhere, often with conflicts on any given night, but we offer highlights of what we managed to review. In addition to the Berkshires we covered five new plays at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The busy season included a number of interviews with artistic directors, actors and playwrights.
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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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