It's nuts out there on the boards! We've got bad Jews & displaced Hindu gods, dead poets and long lost lovers wrestling with love. Here we go! BAD JEWS: This is a real crowd pleaser written by Joshua Harmon, and directed by Rebecca Bradshaw, now breaking records over at SPEAKEASY STAGE. It's raucous and funny and plunges us right into [...]
ENTER for a chance to win complimentary passes to Fathom Event The Met: Live in HD 2014! Please e-mail fathomeventsboston@gmail.com with your full name, address and phone number, PLUS “The Met” in the subject line. Be sure to indicate which show you are requesting! The tickets will be for Showcase Legacy Place. THE SCHEDULE: Carmen Live: Saturday, November 1st at [...]
There's a whole lotta theater goin' on-- here's my take in short: ETHER DOME presented by The Huntington Theatre Company at BU is neither a gas, nor did it put me to sleep. Billed as a medical thriller about the very first surgery performed under anesthesia in 1846 under the "dome" at MGH, the real story is fascinating, but the [...]
The best theatre I've seen lately was a rambunctious KING LEAR presented by ARTS EMERSON and SHAKEPEARE's GLOBE ON TOUR over at the Paramount. Shakespeare's tragedy of a father who is blind to himself and the truth about his daughters-- twin vipers Goneril and Regan (wily performances by Gwendolen Chatfield and Shanaya Rafaat)-- and the true blue [...]
RUSH to see TRACES--a vibrant gorgeous troupe of Canadian circus performers known as LES DOIGTS DE LA MAIN-- or "Seven fingers of the hand." It won't take you long to get a handle on them. Hanging by the slimmest of theatrical threads-- they're supposed to be locked in a shelter during what might be the apocalypse, trying to make the most of their [...]
(Photo by Richard Hall/Silverline Images.) Really GOOD and less good--my assessment of two plays now onstage in Boston. Let's begin with the really "GOOD"-- in capital letters-- production of BENT at Zeitgeist Stage Company. It's a tremendously moving production, keenly directed by David Miller, and much more affecting than the original Broadway production which I saw starring Richard Gere as a [...]
Who could forget Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Hepburn's niece (I could forget her) in the landmark 1967 film about a rich white girl bringing her black upwardly mobile fiance home to meet her parents in the provocatively titled GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER? I remember being completely intrigued-- couldn't wait to see [...]
The title is unwieldy--but in her day she wielded enough intellectual and sexual heat to amp up the already significant wattage of the Age of Enlightenment. Emilie du Chatelet should be a household name like Newton and Einstein but history has shoved her aside. Because of her gender, her brilliance has been overlooked, undermined, and [...]
SWEENEY TODD-- Stephen Sondheim's Tony award-winning masterpiece is a damned fine musical--emphasis on "damned." We're talking a macabre plot based on a 19th century English "penny dreadful" involving a demon barber--wrongfully imprisoned, his wife raped and daughter stolen-- who returns with a vengeance and slits the throats of his shave-craving clients after which his landlady [...]
Warren Jackson, Jacqui Parker & Jermel Nakia Let me help you make your Labor Day Weekend plans! Start by heading up to glorious Gloucester for a remarkable Gloucester Stage Company production of August Wilson's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece FENCES, featuring an extraordinary performance among many great performances that make this production a must-see. [...]
