Hay Fever is sort of like watching a Shaw Festival production starring Lucy Peacock (a Stratford staple if ever there was one). But not one of the marvelous Shaw Festival productions that showcases the festival’s eye for young talent, a dull production designed entirely to show off the set budget and give ageing character actors […]
Flat Earth Theatre and director Lindsay Eagle (nominated for a 2013 Boston My Theatre Award for her excellent work directing Rocket Man), should be commended for choosing to put on a show that delves experimentally into a fictional dystopia, a world fraught with troubling issues such as the extinction of the print book, a one-sex […]
Soulpepper’s 2014 season opener has a cast of great talents. The massive ensemble makes use of the Academy’s rising stars and the bench-depth at Soulpepper is so impressive that they’ve got the likes of Jeff Lillico and Evan Buliung playing bit parts and waitstaff (actually, small part though it is, Buliung’s gentle Austrian workingman is […]
The Children’s Hour is a Crucible-like story about the devastating effects of an angry young woman’s lives on those around her. In this 1934 drama, it is her two schoolmistresses Karen and Martha (played by Kathleen Pollard and Marisa King) who suffer most from the girl’s actions and who lose everything as a result of her […]
I desperately want to like new, emerging fringe theatre in Boston. While we have a vibrant fringe scene, such scene can always use support from patrons and reviewers, especially if it’s good. Porpentine Players offers rarely-produced classic and period pieces for Boston audiences. However, their inaugural production of the terribly difficult A Man for All […]
I always get excited to see a show that I have never seen staged. There is something thrilling about having no pre-conceived notion about what to expect, and being met with an entirely new experience when you enter a theater. This was the case when I saw Salem Theatre Company’s production of Bernard Pomerance’s The […]
I’d been looking forward to the Nora Theatre Company’s production of Terry Johnson’s Insignificance at Central Square Theater for months. Two years ago, the company produced one of my favorite plays I’ve yet seen in Boston, Johnson’s Hysteria. That play, about a historical meeting between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali, was a wit-filled romp that […]
“Never start a story with a description of the weather. Nor end it with a marriage. The critics will kill you.” J.B. Heaps does neither in his compelling new one-act comedy Private Disclosures. There is a great deal of truth to that quote uttered by Preston Sherwood in Heaps’ play – the best plays are […]