Areas We Cover
Categories
Theater
-
Theater Review: THE MEETING TREE (Company One Theatre)
REPAIR AND REPARATIONS Company One’s world premiere of The Meeting Tree powerfully evokes the debate and the struggle over reparations and restitution through the lives of six women, some Black, some white, all of them related through their connection to one white man who lived in Alabama before the abolition of slavery. Director Summer L….
-
Theater Review: ICE CREAM BLONDE (Actors Company)
DEAD BLONDES TELL NO TALES — EXCEPT THIS ONE Conspiracy theories have surrounded the death of actress and restaurateur Thelma Todd since 1935, when her lifeless body was discovered in a garage slumped behind the wheel of her parked Lincoln Phaeton convertible. Alexandra Kopko, as the actress’s ghost, presents a bio of Todd’s life to…
-
Theater Review: ARTEMIS BOOKS & THE WELL-MEANING MAN (The Village Theater at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble)
AN EXTREMELY FEMINIST PLAY. OR IS IT? Never meet a man, they say. What happens if we have to work with one? Artemis Books & The Well-Meaning Man poses the complex question of how, if at all, men should be allowed into women’s safe spaces—or if it’s unethical to exclude them. The Village Theater’s world…
-
Theater Review: BETSY & PATTY FIND OUT (The Broadwater)
WAITING FOR COWDOT Normally, a surfeit of hyphens in any production assures trouble ahead, but Aaron Francis, the writer-director-designer-producer of this subversive, potent indictment of the lethal potential of passivity, has shown himself the exception that either tests or proves that rule. In Betsy & Patty Find Out at the Broadwater Second Stage, seven cows…
-
Theater Review: NOISES OFF (The Old Globe)
NOISES OFF, LAUGHS ON English playwright Michael Frayn debuted his farce Noises Off in 1982, and decades of audiences and reviewers have since happily applauded Frayn’s work as perhaps the funniest as well as the most challenging comedy in the canon of English-language theater. The Old Globe has accepted the Noises Off challenge this summer,…
-
Theater Review: LOVE’S LABOURS LOST (Lanes Coven Theater Company at Windhover Performing Arts Center in Rockport, MA)
WIN OR LOSE, IT’S ABOUT LOVE Wow! Whoever wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost was a comic genius. The wordplay, the multi-lingual puns, and the send-ups of characters stumbling over their own foolishness are endlessly entertaining—except that many productions of this play by William Shakespeare fall flat. The sometimes obscure (to us) Elizabethan references and word usage…
-
Theater Review: MÉNAGE À QUATRE (LA LGBT Center)
MÉNAGE À MEH, OR BOB & CAROL & DEAD & AIRLESS Last Saturday, I caught the world premiere of Ménage à Quatre, a play that seems to promise a farce but instead delivers a muddled mess. Written by Peter Lefcourt and directed by Ryan O’Connor, the show is a guest production at the Davidson/Valentini Theatre…
-
Theater Review: THE FANTASTICKS (Ruskin Group Theatre)
THE KIND OF SEPTEMBER YOU’LL WANT TO REMEMBER With the original opening Off-Broadway in 1960 and running an astounding 42 years, The Fantasticks is a veritable classic amongst the repertoire of musical theater. This perennially popular piece by composer Harvey Schmidt and librettist & lyricist Tom Jones is a two-act chamber piece—an eight-character, minimalistic, melancholic, commedia…
-
Theater Review: A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER (North Coast Rep)
MURDER MOST TUNEFUL In 2013 a new musical called A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder played San Diego’s Old Globe on its way to a prizewinning run on Broadway. The show is now back for a season-ending run at the North Coast Repertory Theatre, Though perhaps a bit less effective than the 2013 version,…
-
Theater Review: THE UNDERSTUDY (Hub Theatre Co. of Boston)
THE SHOW BEHIND THE SHOW A well-done backstage farce is always a good time, especially for theatre lovers. But a well-done backstage farce with something to say, with layers and depth—that is harder to come by, and even more of a good time—thespian or no. Hats off to Hub Theatre Company of Boston‘s The Understudy…
-
Theater Review: REEL TO REEL (Rogue Machine & HorseChart)
LIFE ON REWIND In a co-production with HorseChart Theatre, Rogue Machine Theatre continues its astounding season with John Kolvenbach‘s gem of a play, Reel to Reel, a heart-warming, but definitely not sappy, time-jumping story of a 55-year marriage between the determined Maggie Spoon (Alley Mills Bean), a sound and performance artist, and her more reticent…
-
Theater Review: DOLORES (Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre)
A KNOCK AT THE HEART With her staging of Dolores, Edward Allan Baker’s two-woman drama about domestic violence, director Stephanie Feury—at the theatre that bears her name—has placed on display a small gem of immense worth. Deedee Woche is Sandra, the married sister struggling to hold her lower-middle-class Providence family together. Davonna Dehay is the…
-
Theater Review: 5:45 (Little Theatre at Actors Company)
OFFTIME Abi Watkinson’s one-woman show 5:45 is a poor receptacle for a great deal of talent—one that feels underdeveloped and not fully thought through. The trouble starts with the title. A good title should grab attention, pique curiosity, and function as either clue or bait to lure in a potential patron: The Hundred Years’ War…
-
Theater Review: DOG OF CARNAGE (Broadwater Studio)
A TAIL OF LOVE ON A LEASH Playwright Benjamin Schwartz and director Natalie Nicole Dressel, in league with actors Callie Ott and Spencer Weitzel, have served up in Dog of Carnage one of the sharpest comedies in the Hollywood Fringe. Set in a courtroom—presided over by a grating, tonal, squawking, authoritarian judge—Ott and Weitzel are…
-
Theater Review: JUST TO BE CLOSE TO YOU (Broadwater Stage)
DÉJÀ LOUCHE Just to Be Close to You opens with an immaculately coiffed and mustachioed Cam Poter stepping before the packed audience at the Broadwater Studio as his alter ego, the renowned lounge singer, Carl Poteraychke, and immediately announcing, “For my last song – ” And we are off to the races. Poter is a…
-
Theater Review: NO (Eastwood Performing Arts Center)
SOUNDCHECK FOR SURVIVAL “Aha…sure…uh-huh…yes…ummm…you say….†And so begins NO, dancer/actuation artist Annalisa Limardi’s intriguing, minimalistic dissertation on the social pressures exerted on women, and men as well, to be amenable, positive and passive to the point of evaporation. Limardi hurls about the sizable stage at the Eastwood Performing Arts Center, weaving in and out of…
-
Theater Review: NURSING IS MY LIFE (Upstairs @ El Centro)
PAGING DR. DRAMA, STAT! VITALS NOT STABLE Nursing Is My Life was a heart-breaker for me. Charley Karlotta has spent decades as a registered nurse, raising her family, and dreaming of one day doing a show proclaiming how “nursing is her life.” Karlotta is a petite elfin of a person, and you cannot but be…
-
Theater Review: OH, CONSTANTINE! (Zephyr Theatre)
NICAEA TRY Oh, Constantine! at the Zephyr Theatre is an odd nut to crack. Or I should say review. One of the best-produced shows at the Fringe, this is the brainchild of playwright / director / producer Jan-David Soutar, with producers Athena Rethis and Clent Bowers, production designer Courtney Stepleton, lighting designer Miles Berman, and finally…
-
Theater Review: BEST DAD. NEVER. (Hudson Mainstage)
HOW TO RAISE A DAUGHTER (AND YOURSELF) Woven from his essays featured in Cosmopolitan and O The Oprah Magazine, gay Armenian-American Haig “Hike” Chahinian recounts his humbling and oft-time hilarious adventures as he fumbles through fathering a bouncing biracial baby girl. A compassionate contemplation of all the hardships and hazards the heart is willing to endure for the joy of…
-
Theater Review: GUYS AND DOLLS (Ogunquit Playhouse, Maine)
A WINNING ROLL OF THE DICE The musical theater classic Guys and Dolls has been produced so many times and in so many ways you might think it couldn’t get much better, but don’t bet on it. The odds are in the Ogunquit Playhouse’s favor, thanks to tight direction and eye-popping choreography from Al Blackstone….
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
