I have a new favorite musical and it's called MATILDA THE MUSICAL!!! This literate, darkly funny, empowering, and bizarrely inventive Tony award-winner just hit the Boston Opera House in its first national tour-- and don't you dare miss it! MATILDA THE MUSICAL is based on Roald Dahl's best-selling novel, and captures the writer's strange and shadowy sensibility, as [...]
Summer is in full swing on stages in and around Boston now including two classic musicals, and a trip on the Neverland! North Shore Music Theatre opens its season with FUNNY GIRL the 1963 musical starring Barbra Streisand who went on to win an Oscar for her performance in the 1968 film version. I mention Streisand because of [...]
The TONYS are the new OSCARS. The 70th annual awards show honoring Broadway's best (click HERE for complete winners list) proved yet again what an eloquent, big-hearted, DIVERSE, and extraordinarily talented community theater artists belong to. Every night they take the stage and entertain, illuminate and inspire live audiences heart to heart, body and soul. (click HERE for ALL the performances) This [...]
The world premiere of I WAS MOST ALIVE WITH YOU is firing on all cylinders and requires we be MOST ALIVE as an audience to every cue-- visual and aural-- as we witness this extraordinary ensemble wrestle with life's random cruelties. It's a potent evening presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the BCA's Calderwood Pavilion [...]
Get ready for the first great entertainment at the movies this summer which trades comic book action heroes for the lords of legerdemain known as The Four Horsemen: NOW YOU SEE ME 2! I couldn't take my eyes off this movie which captures the magic of, well, magic! This elaborately tricky plot unfurled itself in double time, criss-crossing the globe while filling every inch [...]
MUST DO this weekend: Head on up to Gloucester Stage and treat yourself to their 37th season opener, Tony Award-winner Peter Shaffer's slight but delicious LETTICE AND LOVAGE about two women who forge a friendship as they mount an attack on the modern world with their love of role-playing and romance! This amusing bauble of a play is polished to perfection by a dazzling [...]
What can you say about a man named Weiner who's famous for exposing his penis to the world? All the jokes have been made, but this film is no joke. It's a real close up, unadorned look at the man behind the appendage, with the caveat that I and you as watchers are all part of his [...]
The view from the wings of the Shubert Theatre was magical... there was the beautiful actress Jennifer Ellis in a satin gown under a silvery light with an even more silvery soprano singing solo from her winning performance in The Lyric Stage Company's marvelous production of MY FAIR LADY. There was the sultry McCaela Donovan holding us spellbound [...]
Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and activist Eve Ensler's body is her "pre-occupation and her occupation," the focus of her body of work beginning with THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES and most recently her 2013 memoir turned stage adaptation now having its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater. IN THE BODY OF THE WORLD is not for the faint of [...]
MONEY MONSTER the new film directed by Jodie Foster starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts--is as phony as a three dollar bill. It's a cornball, ham-fisted, heapin' helpin' of preposterousity--and though that's not a real word, it is nonetheless a perfect descriptor for this "not a real movie." Within five minutes I was getting a whiff of the cheesiness, sniffing out [...]
