Theater is in full bloom right now with one of the best shows ever onstage in Boston! INDECENT now in its Boston premiere at The Huntington Theatre shimmers with its brilliant commingling of all the elements that make for great theater: a play within a play that throws light on its creators and [...]
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 [...]
What can you say about a dead dog that hasn't been said already? That it was stabbed with a pitchfork and discovered by a teenage math wiz with some unusual behavioral problems? "Holy f__k!" the play's opening salvo, is delivered by the dog's owner as she stumbles upon the teenager at the grisly scene center stage, in a shaft of light. So begins "The Curious Incident [...]
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 [...]
Mark Evans & Christopher John O'Neill It was a bad week for missionaries and mad men in Boston. First, THE BOOK OF MORMON blew into town on the strength of its nine Tony Awards and buzz born of NY Times Ben Brantley's boast that the show was "the best musical of this century." [...]
My husband remarked, that any show that needs a troupe of circus performers to liven it up couldn't be much of a show to begin with. He has a point. PIPPIN-- the 1972 Tony Award-winning musical is once again headed for Broadway in a new incarnation. The A.R.T.'s 40th Anniversary production certainly gets a lift [...]
It's one of my all time favorite musicals: the monumental and deeply American tale based on E.L. Doctorow's novel RAGTIME! Producing director Meg Fofonoff's Fiddlehead Theatre Company--in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union-- mounted this Tony-Award-winning musical as the season opener at the newly refurbished Strand Theatre in Dorchester. Ragtime's themes of social justice [...]
Theater season is up and running and this week I'll give you my take--beginning with the best show on stage right now: the Huntington Theatre Company's wise and wicked-funny season opener GOOD PEOPLE! It's a Tony-nominated show that's very close to home. Pulitzer Prize-winner and South Boston native David Lindsay-Abaire has set his tale in [...]
YOU MUST SEE The Tony Award-winning Broadway show FELA now playing at Boston's Cutler Majestic Theatre!! It's a spectacularly inspiring hybrid: theater, music, dance, biography, history lesson, political rally, religious experience, and the first theatrical production I've REALLY wanted to write about in awhile. Directed and choregraphed by the great Bill T. Jones, FELA is [...]
