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 [...]
I knew he was good, but even from the trailer I could tell SHE was good too. What I couldn't tell was just HOW good they would be together. Writer/director/composer/star Bradley Cooper found his muse in singer/composer/performance artist Lady Gaga; their alchemy is what tethered me to this moving, though imperfect film, and [...]
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 [...]
Let's begin with STRAIGHT WHITE MEN-- since most things do. But time's up and now what? That's the question raised by playwright Young Jean Lee in her Broadway hit now having its New England premiere onstage presented by New Rep Theatre. First, I am a fan of another work of Lee's-- "We're Gonna Die" which [...]
The evening seared my soul: Langston Hughes' poem THE BLACK CLOWN made its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater this week, awesome, painful, and inspiring word made flesh. The piece adapted by performer Davone Tines (who first wowed me in CROSSING) and composer Michael Schachter is a brilliant collage of word, music, and movement, [...]
The dog days of summer feature two movies based on books that require some navigation through PC muddied waters. BLACKkKLANSMAN is Spike Lee's take on the "true" tale of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, Denzel's son!) the first black detective on the Colorado Springs Police Force in the early '70's who infiltrates the Ku Klux [...]
I left the show trailing streamers, confetti and what was left of my breath. The world premiere, Broadway-bound musical MOULIN ROUGE! THE MUSICAL has just reopened America's oldest and most beautiful theatre, Boston's Emerson Colonial -- and what a rebirth! The show is a no holds barred, dazzling live theatrical reinvention of Baz Luhrman's Oscar-nominated [...]
