My head is spinning between Oscar nominations-- an exceptional batch of movies this year--and theater which stretches the boundaries. Though it's only here til Sunday-- I loved it so much I couldn't resist writing about it! Read on... MUST SEE: MOBY DICK-- with puppets!! Wait, what? This production is a marvel, somewhere between stagecraft and [...]
Seeing "SUMMER: The Donna Summer Musical" at the Colonial Theatre this week made me long for six more weeks of WINTER. The show which attempts to tell the story of Boston's own LaDonna Adrian Gaines who became the Queen of Disco, is a fiasco from beginning to end. In addition to limp direction and limper choreography, [...]
Marie Mullen as Mag Folan & Aisling O’Sullivan as Maureen Folan Here's an Irish double feature beginning with THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE now on the ArtsEmerson Paramount Mainstage. I had never before seen this Tony Award-winning dark Irish tragi-comedy, the first of a trilogy by Martin McDonough. First performed by Ireland's Druid Theatre Company in Galway in 1996, it [...]
I'm exhausted. A few nights ago I watched 5 French Canadians called MACHINE DE CIRQUE high on guts and testosterone, hurtle through 90 minutes of breathtaking (mine and theirs) acrobatics, juggling, and jocularity using bicycles, trapezes, seesaws, unicycles, ropes and poles, scaffolding and towels--yes towels--which may have been most breathtaking of all. The towels were all that kept them from being in the "all together" and me [...]
It has been an intense week for theater-- all of it worthy and wildly different! Check out THE LAUNCH PRIZE a terrifically engaging new play presented by MJ Halberstadt and produced by Bridge Rep. The situation is as timely as it is provocative. Four arts students are vying for the big, year-end academic prize which will launch their [...]
AN OCTOROON co-presented by Company One Theatre and Arts Emerson is smart, sassy, devastating "play-within- a-play"making, which begins with a black playwright casually putting on white face, and speaking directly to us through the layers. The central questions-- what it is to be black, to be white, to be any color in between, what those designations have to do with [...]
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 [...]
Boston Theater Critics Association members with Olympia Dukakis and Paul Daigneault Olympia Dukakis Paul Daigneault It was a fabulous night!! THE MAYOR Marty Walsh spoke about his commitment to Boston as an ARTS town; OSCAR-WINNER Olympia Dukakis was honored, and her cousin and former GOVERNOR Mike Dukakis paid [...]
There are two intense productions onstage in Boston right now--the first is an eye-opening, "in your face" piece of theater by that frisky but serious COMPANY ONE, now doing its first show at Arts Emerson's Paramount Black Box. "WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT...." tells the story of the first genocide of the 20th century, the [...]
There's an ethnic smorgasbord onstage around town; I'm half Italian-- so let's begin with ArtsEmerson's presentation of Carlo Goldoni's commedia dell' arte classic THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS. A maelstrom of mayhem ensues when a servant hatches a plan to earn twice as much money by serving two masters simultaneously! Warning: A little commedia dell [...]
