Lynne Weiss

AN UNEXPECTED AND BEAUTIFUL VISIT Once, not very long ago, a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important. These sentences, projected on a screen, are the opening of The Band’s Visit, the musical that won 10 Tony Awards in 2018. Directed by Paul Daigneault…

FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of the 1998 Pulitzer-winning drama How I Learned to Drive takes its audience on a harrowing ride through the dark land of sexual abuse and incest illuminated by moments of honesty, humor, and humanity. Director Elaine Vaan Hogue keeps playwright Paula Vogel’s best-known work moving through its complex…

A FOLIO AND ITS MAKERS Playwright Lauren Gunderson (Bauer, Silent Sky) has a gift of dramatizing small moments in history to illuminate larger influences, and that is exactly what she does in The Book of Will. Under the direction of Bryn Boice, the Hub Theatre Company, which offers pay-what-you-can tickets for every seat at every…

BLACK JOY RIDE This collaboration between Boston’s Black theater company Front Porch Arts Collective and the Atlanta-based Alliance Theater Company, directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, takes its audience into a fun-house version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that is, well, FUN even as it offers the characters and the audience visions of their better selves. James Ijames’s Fat…

LIVES OF NOT-SO-QUIET DESPERATION The premise is simple: Each of nine people who have tried to kill or who actually have killed an American president is given a chance to persuade us of his or her higher purpose. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins  is an entertainment’”in the bygone sense of revues and follies built around…

ONE PLAGUE OR ANOTHER What happens when you put eight actors on a stage with a script that includes the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, the Mormon Visitors Center, the Jewish mysticism of philosopher Walter Benjamin, and Roy Cohn’”one of the slimiest lawyers who ever lived? If that script happens to be Angels in America…

WELCOME TO THE WEST WING, WHERE THE WOMEN ARE FUCKED AND THE MAN IS FECKLESS Seven women propping up one man’”that’s the premise behind Selena Fillinger’s POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive. The widely produced play, which had its Broadway debut just a little over a year…

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KATRINA? What to do about The Taming of the Shrew, a play that seems to glorify the subjugation of women? Actors’ Shakespeare Project offers an intriguing and very entertaining answer. Under the direction of ASP Artistic Director Christopher V. Edwards, this cast — with only one male performer,…

A PRAYER FOR ALL OF US Should they stay or should they go? That is the question that haunts the characters of this brilliant play by Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews, Skintight).  It is directed by Loretta Greco, the new artistic director of The Huntington. As a long-time Boston-area theater fan, I can only say that if…

A SHOWER OF CREATIVE INNOVATION The A.R.T. production of the stunningly staged and audaciously acted The Half-God of Rainfall is an act of creative destruction. It begins with the seven actors crashing through the fourth wall by appearing on the stage and introducing themselves by name and then listing their role or roles. This places…

DOWN AND UP IN HARLEM Barrington Stage Company’s riveting production of Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky, directed by Candis C. Jones, opens with a fast-paced scene in which Guy Jacobs (Brandon Alvión) drags a seriously drunk Angel Allen (Tsilala Brock) up to his apartment with help from a stranger, Leland Cunningham (DeLeon Dallas)….

A FENCES THAT KEEPS US IN Actors “ranney” and Ella Joyce bring a fresh and warm humanity to Shakespeare and Company‘s excellent and very satisfying production of August Wilson’s Fences, which opened this week at the Tina Packer Playhouse in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. Troy Maxson  is a character not often included in our representations…

FASCINATING, FUN AND FEEL-GOOD RHYTHM With stellar performances on two baby grands, a few silly props, and creative use of audience participation, Kirsten Salpini (sometimes wearing a tie to indicate Gershwin) and Jared Troilo (sometimes in bushy white wig to indicate Bernstein) pay energetic and loving tribute to the music of George Gershwin and Leonard…

A DUAL DUARTE DE PERí“N Understudy Isabella Lopez won a heartfelt standing ovation for her captivating portrayal of Eva Perón, the spiritual leader of Argentina last night in this A.R.T. revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics) classic Evita (Tony Award Best Musical). Director Sammi Cannold, who visited Argentina repeatedly to…

AMAZING THEATER? BANK ON IT Steven Skybell (Henry Lehman), Joshua David Robinson (Emanuel Lehman), and Firdous Bamji (Mayer Lehman) absolutely stunned in the the first American-made production of The Lehman Trilogy, which opened at The Huntington last week. They slipped in and out of multiple roles, including babies, toddlers, men of diverse ethnic and regional…

AS WE LOVE IT Talk about chemistry! The amazing Genevieve Simon, who wowed us with a riveting performance in the title role of Coriolanus earlier this year, flirts and schemes into our hearts in the very different role of Rosalind in Actors Shakespeare Project‘s As You Like it — in collaboration with Theater Offensive, whose…