Theatre
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Rome Neal as Thelonious Monk
Laurence Holder's Play Captures the Jazz Icon
By: - Oct 07th, 2017Laurence Holder’s iconic one man show Monk brings the jazz legend life to the stage. Rome Neal, actor and director, becomes Thelonious Monk, and for 90 minutes we move through the defeats and triumph’s of the man’s work, life and artistic era.
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Musical Redemption: Huntington's Merrily We Roll Along
Stephen Sondheim Musical Initially Considered a Flop.
By: - Oct 07th, 2017One of the more obscure of Sondheim's musical, the Huntington Theatre Company's terrific production underscore's its vitality and quality. Director Maria Friedman’s stunning London production of Merrily We Roll Along received universal rave reviews – the most five star reviews in West End history as well as the Olivier Award for Best Musical. Now she has recreated it for Boston audiences. Travelling backwards in time over 20 years in the entertainment business, this musical focuses on the relationships of close friends Franklin, Charley, and Mary, and features some of Sondheim’s most memorable songs, including “Good Thing Going,” “Old Friends,” and “Not a Day Goes By." Seeing the show is like an old friend remembered.
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Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton at Barrington Stage
Illuminating Vintage Psychological Thriller
By: - Oct 09th, 2017For community and school based fall programming Barrington Stage has revised the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Gaslight. It's best know for its second of two film versions in 1944 which starred Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotton and the ingenue, Angela Lansberry as the frisky maid Nancy. The Barrington production, while well cast and crafted, given the zeitgeist and setting of the 1880s, is dark, somber and drab.
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Crossing at BAM
Whitman Focus of Composer Matthew Aucoin
By: - Oct 08th, 2017Crossing premiered at ART in Cambridge, Mass. in 2015. Now it comes to BAM as part of the Next Wave Festival.
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The Humans In Suburban Miami
Tony Award-Winning Play at GableStage
By: - Oct 09th, 2017One can't overstate The Humans relevance to modern times. Stephen Karam's play is humorous, heartbreaking and creepy. The cast offers multi-dimensional performances in a first-rate production.
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Composer Librettists Development Program
Lawrence Edelson Celebrates Opera
By: - Sep 28th, 2017American Lyric Theater was founded in 2005. Lawrence Edelson, a tenor and stage director, wondered how best to develop national operas. When opera was first introduced to the US was intentionally European and elitist. That formula no longer works. New works are springing up all over the country, and the ALT and its composer librettist programs has trained and launched the careers of many of this generations' composers and librettists. At the heart of their program is a kind of master's degree in opera. It is based on mentorship, which subtly differs from teaching.
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Blank Out by Michel Van Der Aa
Miah Persson and Roderick Williams Excel
By: - Sep 26th, 2017Under the canopy formed by the dome of the Drill Hall in the Park Avenue Armory, Michel Van der Aa’s brilliant chamber opera, Blank Out, unfolds. In this gargantuan space, we seemed small and so did elements of the opera.
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How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel
At Custom Made Theatre in San Francisco
By: - Sep 16th, 2017This production that delves into molestation is a worthy realization of Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize winning and otherwise highly decorated play, How I Learned to Drive. The story of Li’l Bit unfolds in a non-linear, but clearly demarcated fashion, from the character’s eleventh year until she is 35.
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War Stories from Opera Philadelphia
Philadelphia Museum of Art Provides Dramatic Setting
By: - Sep 18th, 2017Inaugurating your season with a festival is setting the entertainment bar a notch higher. One after another as this festival week unfolds, dramas of high intensity, great variety set in unusual locations proceed to both jar and move. It is a mind-blowing experience.
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God of Carnage at Shakespeare & Company
Fall Show a Barrel of Monkeys
By: - Sep 23rd, 2017For its fall foliage production Shakespeare & Company have produced a corker. Regge Life has directed four masters of the company in Yasmina Reza's 2009 Tony wnner God of Carnage. The all star ensemble includes S&Co. veterans Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Allyn Burrows, Jonathan Croy and Kristin Wold. Saving the best for last it is the most hilarious comedy of the Berkshire season.
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The Rembrandt at Steppenwolf Theatre
Charming Morsel of a Play by Jessica Dickey
By: - Sep 23rd, 2017The best reason to see The Rembrandt by Jessica Dickey is the cast, sensitively directed by Hallie Gordon. Two of Steppenwolf’s and Chicago’s finest actors—Francis Guinan and John Mahoney—perform as museum guard, painter and poet
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In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play
By Sarah Ruhl at Pear Theatre
By: - Sep 23rd, 2017“In the Next Room” explores change, and how technology brings it about. In addition to the impact revealed by use of a newly developed personal appliance, it touches on the profound macro consequences of the coming of electricity.
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Prince Of Broadway
Seven Decades of a Legendary Career
By: - Sep 23rd, 2017Well honed actors aside, Prince Of Broadway is saturated with top-of-the-line technical talent, from his co-director and choreographer Susan Stroman, to Jason Robert Brown’s, new songs, arrangements, orchestration and music supervision, Beowulf Boritt’s scenic and production design, William Ivey Long’s Costumes, and Howell Binkley’s lighting, all multiple Tony Winners, give their all.
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Oleanna In South Florida
Mamet play Provokes at Boca Raton Company
By: - Sep 24th, 2017Boca Raton's Evening Star Productions is giving David Mamet's Oleanna a riveting production Thd company's staging is marked by tension, great acting. The bully isn't the professor.
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Amy Herzog at New York Theatre Workshop
Carrie Coon Stars in Mary Jane
By: - Sep 25th, 2017Award-winning playwright Amy Herzog comes to the New York Theatre Workshop with "Mary Jane." Carrie Coon creates an unforgettable figure in the title role.
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On Site Opera Focuses on Dinosaurs
Natural History Museum Setting
By: - Sep 24th, 2017If you are asked what’s the most exciting character you can think of and answer is 'dinosaurs', it’s just a short leap to the creation of an opera about them if you want a audience that says opera, next, then make an opera about dinosaurs. On Site Opera has done just this.
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Hand to God, by Robert Askins
At The Stage in San Jose
By: - Sep 26th, 2017Playwright Robert Askins draws on his small town Texas upbringing in the Lutheran Church to craft this tale of perverse adults hiding behind conservative fabric and teens ill-suited to their community.
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The Song of the Nightingale
Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette California
By: - Oct 10th, 2017The Song of the Nightingale is comprised of numerous clashes – the well being of the poor fishermen who must provide fish for the Emperor’s banquets versus the pleasure of Emperor; the needs of the Emperor’s sister who is the brains behind the administration versus the ego of the Emperor; and the young fisherman Xaio versus the girl that he loves, Mei, who aspires to higher goals and has been lifted from the fishing village to become a maid in the palace.
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Henry IV, Part One
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
By: - Aug 06th, 2017Director Lilean Blais-Cruz does well with limited resources. Actors extract whatever drama and humor that the words allow. Lighting and sound achieve expected OSF standards. This production plays in the round and with a minimum of staging – the fixed portion being a number of vertical white pipes with light wands attached to a maze of pipes above.
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Jeanne Sakata’s Hold These Truths
Solo Show at Pasadena Playhouse
By: - Jun 10th, 2017Playwright Jeanne Sakata, a successful actor herself, premiered Hold These Truths in 2007 at East West Players in Los Angeles. It made its off-Broadway debut in 2012 with the Epic Theatre Ensemble, and has since been performed at numerous regional theatres including Portland Center Stage, the Guthrie Theater, Seattle’s ACT Theatre, and locally by Coachella Valley Rep in Palm Springs.
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Ragtime at Barrington Stage Company
Timely Revival of Issues Based Musical
By: - Jun 30th, 2017Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield has a reputation for mounting an annual blockbuster revival of a vintage musical. It also has an an agenda to present message plays that inspire and inform audiences. In the era of Trump Barrington is presenting Ragtime which seemingly conflates the mandates for entertainment and education. It results in a long evening top heavy with big ideas, multiple characters and confusing subplots.
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The Roommate at WTF
Full House for Jen Silverman's Quirky Two Hander
By: - Jul 02nd, 2017Since its debut at the Humana Festival in 2015 The Roommate by Jen Silverman has been widely produced. It has the advantage of being an intimate two-hander. But it is being given a lavish production and marquee players at Williamstown Theatre Festival. With Jane Kaczmarek (Robyn), S. Epatha Merkerson (Sharon) selling tickets in the Berkshires is this a production that may be headed to New York? Significantly Silverman was in town tweaking the script.
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Play About Climate Change in Miami Shores
World Premiere by Mad Cat Theatre Company
By: - Jul 03rd, 2017A new dark comedy, Firemen Are Rarely Necessary shines harsh light on global warming, censorship and corruption in government. Short, pithy scenes and snappy dialogue keep us riveted. A new play by Theo Reyna has biting comedy that awakens us to realities.
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Constellations by Brit Nick Payne
Geffen Playhouse in LA
By: - Jul 04th, 2017“Constellations”, a poignant drama written by British playwright Nick Payne, is deftly staged by award-winning director Giovanna Sardelli that validates the acting gifts of its two stars: pixie-like Ginnifer Goodwin and handsome leading man Allen Leech (best known for his six year run in the TV blockbuster series “Downton Abbey”, as the family chauffeur).
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Critical Condition
ATCA Conference in San Francisco
By: - Jul 04th, 2017In the age of social media everyone is a critic., Some enthusiasts post their "reviews" and images to Twitter and Facebook before curtain calls.That was he elephant in the room as some 80 of the 250 members of American Theatre Critics Association gathered for an annual conference this time in San Francisco. In addition to several days of seeing theatre there were meetings and panel discussions focused on issues and ideas in the profession.
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