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Theater Reviews: SARDINES (The Huntington’s Maso Studio) & 300 PAINTINGS (A.R.T.’s Farkas Hall)
STANDING UP FOR HUMANITY Here are my criteria for a good night of comedy: 1) It needs to be surprising. 2) It needs to make me think. 3) It needs to promote values that make us better human beings. 4) Oh, it needs to be funny. Chris Grace Both Sardines (a comedy about death) at…
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Theater Review: VEAL (A Red Orchid Theatre)
SINK YOUR TEETH INTO THIS BLOODY CUT OF MEAT At some time in the future, a band of rebels have staged a successful coup against the United States. The prevailing system of order has been violently overthrown. Cities are razed to the ground, with surviving citizenry housed in camps. Food is scarce. Medicine is scarcer….
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Theater Review: SMALL (The Old Globe in San Diego)
SMALL IS EPIC In his exceptional how-to book Storyworthy, author and storyteller Matthew Dicks advises us to stop recounting tales that few can relate to — like the time you climbed Mt. Everest — and instead share stories that help others see themselves in similar moments. That’s how a story connects. Robert Montano does exactly…
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Theater Review: ADOLESCENT SALVATION (Rogue Machine Theatre at The Matrix)
THE RADIANT DISORDER OF TIM VENABLE’S TEENAGE INFERNO Rogue Machine is presenting Tim Venable’s intense and disquieting new play Adolescent Salvation, which arrives not as a tidy debutante but as a brilliant troublemaker. It lurches, it burns, it contradicts itself. It is alive in ways most new plays are not. Venable has a gift for…
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Theater Review: SUFFS (National Tour)
A GREAT MUSICAL, SUFFS REMINDS US THAT DEMOCRACY ONLY MOVES FORWARD WHEN WOMEN DO While much of what we love in musicals is pure fiction, history has had an undeniable flair for the dramatic — and Broadway has always noticed. From Hamilton to 1776 to Evita, political legends have inspired some of the stage’s most…
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Theater Review: OTHERKIN (Road Theatre Company)
DRAGONS, DOOMSDAY, AND DAZZLE The Road Theatre Company launches its 34th season with N.T. Vandecar’s Otherkin, a bold, visually stunning new work staged by Christina Carlisi in her directorial premiere. Even when its mythology gets dense, the production keeps you hooked, partly because it looks fantastic, but mostly because it’s anchored by the beating heart…
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Theater Review: ROME, SWEET ROME (Chicago Shakespeare)
CARB-LOADERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! “For the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread…†Alright, so that’s not from Julius Caesar but Coriolanus, that other Shakespeare play about a politician undone by his own ambition and hubris (and that coincidentally also features a character called Brutus), but in this “ad-rap-tation” of the Bard’s…
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Theater Review: THE COUNTER (Umbrella Stage Company in Concord, MA)
A STRONG BREW OF CHARACTER AND STORY The Counter is the latest in a series of plays in greater Boston featuring a character who pours drinks. In recent months we’ve had Primary Trust, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), Spitfire Grill, and Waitress. Spitfire Grill, Two Strangers, and The Counter all feature a…
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Theater Review: WEATHER GIRL (St. Ann’s Warehouse)
WEATHER FORECAST: FUNNY AND SUNNY WITH A CHANCE OF ARMAGEDDON In recent years, I have watched a wave of productions by Millennial and Gen Z artists who are, quite understandably, petrified by the future and by the ecological catastrophe we have handed them. Francesca Moody Productions, the British powerhouse behind two of the most successful…
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Theater Review: LEO LIONNI’S “FREDERICK” (Chicago Children’s Theatre)
A thing of beauty is a joy forever. — John Keats Sleep-deprived and fortified with four cups of coffee, I hauled my cranky, cynical self on a Sunday morning to the Chicago Children’s Theatre in the West Loop to watch the opening production of their 20th season: a musical of Leo Lionni’s Frederick, a Caldecott Honor…
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Theater Review: HUZZAH! (The Old Globe)
HUZZAH AND HO-HUM The curtain speech at Huzzah! — which opened Thursday at The Old Globe — comes with bassoon and tambourine: silence thy phones, feed not ye actors. This bit of business tells you everything. The evening ahead will be enthusiastic, self-aware, and content to play within modest boundaries. The cast Nell Benjamin and…
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Theater Review: INTO THE WOODS (Spreckels Theatre Company in Rohnert Park)
A SONDHEIM SPECTACLE Sonoma County’s Spreckels Performing Arts Center has launched a tremendous production of Into the Woods, the perpetually popular and nearly forty-year-old musical spoof of classic fairy tales by composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and author James Lapine. The show debuted on Broadway in 1987, won multiple Tony awards, and has been a recurring item…
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Theater Review: AVA: THE SECRET CONVERSATIONS (Studebaker Theater)
TWO CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR An aging, reclusive movie star strikes up a relationship with a struggling writer. It may sound familiar but this isn’t Sunset Boulevard, more’s the pity. The star in question is screen legend Ava Gardner, who, in the late 1980s, contracted British journalist Peter Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography….
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Theater Review: THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (Boston Court)
OH, WHAT A NIGHT Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana (1961) may be viewed as the finish of a journey the playwright began twenty years earlier with The Glass Menagerie (1944). The one was his first critical and commercial success, the other his last. After Iguana, Williams would continue to write plays and one-acts…
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Theater Review: THE MOUNTAINTOP (Front Porch Arts Collective)
LEGACY MEETS MORTALITY IN THE MOUNTAINTOP This superb production of Katori Hall‘s The Mountaintop, a surprise-filled two-hander depicting King’s last night before his assassination, is not just history. Director Maurice Emmanuel Parent works with two excellent actors—Dominic Carter and Kiera Prusmack—to lead us to understand that King’s concerns and work are still relevant. It’s at…
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Theater Review: HAMILTON (National Tour in Boston)
STILL SCRAPPY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS It has been more than ten years since Hamilton’s Off-Broadway premiere. Alexander Hamilton may have declared himself—like his country—“young, scrappy, and hungry,” with scrappy meaning feisty, resourceful, and unwilling to back down. The musical that bears his name is no longer young, nor is it hungry—according to a 2020…
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Theater Review: COME FROM AWAY (La Mirada Theatre)
A Town, a Tragedy, and the Triumph of Kindness The musical Come From Away — with book, music and lyrics by married couple Irene Sankoff and David Hein — tells the remarkable true story of the small town of Gander (population 9,000) in Newfoundland, Canada, about 1,500 miles from New York City. Nearly 25 years ago, in 2001,…
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Theater Review: DAMN YANKEES (Arena Stage)
DAMN YANKEES SWINGS BACK IN STYLE: ARENA’S REVIVAL IS MORE THAN A MUSICAL — IT’S A MILESTONE When Damn Yankees first opened on Broadway in 1955, it was the ultimate baseball fantasy: a middle-aged fan makes a Faustian bargain with the devil to turn into a young slugger for the Washington Senators and finally beat…
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Theater Review: WISH YOU WERE HERE (Remy Bumppo at Theater Wit)
THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL In 1978, five women gather in an upper-middle-class home in Karaj, Iran, to primp and prepare themselves; one of them is getting married and being that they are her closest friends, the others are there to make sure she is at her best, both aesthetically and emotionally. It’s a scene…
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Theater Review: OUR TOWN (Lyric Stage Company of Boston)
OUR TOWN, AND YOURS Thorton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize winning play Our Town is a masterpiece, drawing on inspiration from the likes of Bertholt Brecht and traditional Chinese theatre. With touches of feminism ahead of his time, and a celebration of the connections between the everyday and the cosmic dimensions of human experience, Wilder constructed…
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