The Lyric Stage company has gone from THE WOLVES to THE LITTLE FOXES, Lillian Hellman's classic about a ravenous pack of southerners hungry for a business deal that would satiate their need for even greater wealth and power. This melodrama set in the antebellum south is brilliantly helmed by Scott Edmiston, staged on a glorious [...]
Women dominate much of what's onstage right now, beginning with George Bernard Shaw's comedy of manners, gender, class, and now-- colonialism and cultural assimilation. PYGMALION has gotten a makeover by New York's brilliant Bedlam theater company by way of Underground Railway Theater at Central Square. It's a crisp, up-to-the minute, vibrant and touching take on a classic. [...]
SO MUCH THEATER OUT THERE NOW! I caught up with five shows while nursing a broken ankle (don't ask) and most of them were worth going the distance. OTHELLO at THE AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER in Cambridge by way of The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an update on Shakespeare's tragedy about a noble man of [...]
There are two new comedies onstage in Boston right now, both entertaining, and well-executed by superb casts, but it was the scripts that gave me pause. The New England premiere of SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company was a hit off-broadway and absolutely made me laugh-- and that's about it. What we have [...]
Here are four recommendations, the best, the bawdiest, most delightful, and thoroughly musical offerings onstage now: beginning with The Huntington's MAN IN THE RING which is simply a masterpiece and THE BEST PRODUCTION ONSTAGE NOW. This is a profoundly moving, complex, brilliantly performed and conceived bio-drama about fighter Emile Griffiths here played by two actors, [...]
There's one more weekend to catch a terrific tandem production presented by ACTORS' SHAKESPEARE PROJECT to open its 15th season, a theater double feature: MACBETH and EQUIVOCATION. The first is the bard's blackest tragedy, so violent, pitiless and bleak, its name cannot be uttered in a theater without tempting wicked fate. This production of "the [...]
SpeakEasy Stage continues its superb season with a regional premiere and one of the best local productions of a Tony-Award winning musical I've ever seen: FUN HOME. I saw this heartbreaking musical last season in Boston's big Opera House; the voices were stronger, but the intimate setting the show finds onstage at SpeakEasy gives this [...]
I just saw a very moving "theater double feature" in one afternoon involving sons and daughters in jeopardy. Boston Playwrights' Theatre just opened its season with "THE TRAGIC ECSTASY OF GIRLHOOD" a new play with an unwieldy title but an ensemble of exceptional young actresses who draw us into the painful emotional centers of their [...]
Speakeasy Stage Company is in top form as it kicks off its season with a superb production of the New England premiere of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning play BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY. Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis and billed as a "dark urban comedy," the play plunges us into the murky water where most human beings [...]
Heads up. HAMILTON is a great show. OK OK. You knew that-- but I finally saw it for myself. I left the theater with my jaw on the floor and the score vibrating through my bones. The theatrical shot heard round the world has taken three years to get to Boston's Opera House-- as if [...]
