Heading into the holidays, here are some stage and screen gems to see NOW! I discussed most of the following on THE CULTURE SHOW (89.7 GBH) with host Jared Bowen. Listen HERE! to our conversation which begins at 20:16 minutes in. (The beginning of our chat referenced the BLACK EYE I was sporting after running around the Back Bay and falling off a pair of high heels! No permanent damage–and my eye is fine.)
You can also READ a brief synopsis of our conversation below which also includes a film we did not discuss but which I touch on below: SENTIMENTAL VALUE.
Click here for FUN HOME and HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD previously reviewed on this site.
A SHERLOCK CAROL is now onstage at THE LYRIC Through DECEMBER 21! It’s a marvelous mashup of Doyle’s super sleuth and Dickens’ ghostly Christmas fable. A witty script by Mark Shanahan, smoothly directed by Ilyse Robbins and starring a cast of beloved Boston veterans led by comedic genius/dramatic actor Paul Melendy, finds Sherlock Holmes in the middle of an existential crisis while solving the murder of Ebenezer Scrooge! Comfort and joy abound as do multiple roles for this crack ensemble: Leigh Barrett, Christopher Chew as the doddering Scrooge, Mark Linehan, Jon Vellante, Michelle Moran… terrific set and costumes and just the right tone—comedy, mystery, and the sweetness of the season!
SWEENEY CLAUS: DEMON FATHER OF SLEET STREET is another voluptuously vulgar Christmas musical propelled by the unruly imagination of Ryan Landry and executed by those delightfully naughty GOLD DUST ORPHANS. A messianic menagerie of songs, costumes, sets, and video montages, this year’s musical is set in Scituate, and features talented newcomers: Thain Bertin as Sweeney’s serial-killing barber, and Mary Mahoney as reindeer ingenue Johanna, both with amazing voices in a sea of golden pipes. Big guy, big-voiced Tim Lawton plays a perverted Santa Claus with an unsavory appetite for his reindeer, and Ryan Landry plays the bloody meat-pie maker Mrs.“Leave it.” (Wish they’d made her Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt…!)
Despite the simulated debauchery, potty jokes, and full-frontal nudity, Landry always brings it back to the true spirit of Christmas – at the end he has the entire audience up on its feet, holding hands, and singing “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas!”
WARNING!! DO NOT let children anywhere near this show, but you’re in for an unforgettable Holiday experience through DECEMBER 21 at The Iron Wolf Theatre, South Boston Lithuanian Citizens Association, 368 West Broadway
MOVIES:
Credit: Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
HAMNET- absolutely one of the best films of the year! HAMNET is the name of William Shakespeares’s son HAMNET who died at age 11 in 1596 and about whom little is known. (In 1596 the names HAMNET and HAMLET were interchangeable.) The movie HAMNET based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell who co-wrote the screenplay with director CHLOE ZHAO (OSCAR for NOMADLAND 2021), centers the death of Hamnet as the motivating force behind Shakespeare’s tragedy HAMLET.
The movie strikes an almost mystical, dreamy, other worldly tone which outlines the landscape we are about to inhabit– the porous boundary between earthly life, death, and art. Paul Mescal is effective as Shakespeare, but it’s Jesse Buckley as Will’s wife Agnes who takes center stage– Buckley already inspiring OSCAR talk as Best Actress.
The film builds to an anguished climax, and is then capped by an exhilarating final scene linking all the film’s narrative strands, culminating in an epiphany as we hear Hamlet’s famous soliloquy as if for the first time. The random, sad, and wondrous mystery that is mortality is suddenly transcendent when shared, for example, at the theater!
WICKED: FOR GOOD –Listen to me: it IS good! No matter what those other critics say, I say it is as good and for me, even better than Part I! Part I is much longer, more cluttered, funnier, lighter in tone, and anchored by that big musical number “Defying Gravity.”
Part II is darker, more emotionally complex, features some real romance between Elphaba and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), and explores the emotional underpinnings of Elphaba’s turn to the dark side as the WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST, while Glinda remains a now “self-aware”girl in the bubble expressed in a smart new song. True to the essence of fairy tales– if you’re paying attention–neither Elphaba nor Glinda is wholly comfortable being all one thing, which links them as much as pulls them apart.
Director Jon Chu does a fine job of weaving the plot of the original “The Wizard of OZ” into the background of the complicated relationship between Glinda and Elphaba whose poignant parting at the conclusion is sad AND satisfying. Part II is anchored by that gorgeous song “For Good” an incomparable duet between ARIANA GRANDE and CYNTHIA ERIVO- miraculous performances and voices separately and together– which left me shredded and craving all that is GOOD.
SENTIMENTAL VALUE won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year and is generating Oscar buzz. Directed by Joaquim Trier, it’s subtle and well-acted though I found it derivative. Stellan Skarsgård co-stars as a self-absorbed film director estranged from his daughters, one an actress– the remarkable Renate Reinsve who astonishes in one of the best opening scenes ever–an actress in the throes of stage fright on opening night! The scene foreshadows what’s at stake in the film: the visceral connection between real life and life on stage.
After their mother’s death, the daughters have to deal with their father who, in a professional and personal bid for redemption, has written what he hopes is his comeback and in which he wants his daughter to star. When she declines, he casts a famous Hollywood actress wonderfully captured by Elle Fanning.
I was quietly held from beginning to end through beautifully measured scenes, the movie slowly giving up its generational secrets, with no thunderous revelation, and then, somewhat anticlimactically, arriving exactly where I thought it would, landing with a whisper, then disappearing.
