Theater For a New Audience’s The Merchant of Venice, a restaging of a New York version of Shakespeare’s famously controversial “problem play”, is an odd duck of a production– a whack-a-mole of quality that pulls concepts and character arcs off stage just as they begin to fully form. The production is nowhere near a loss– […]
The final production of The Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s Winter Festival was Living in Exile. The production hit roadblock after roadblock on its way to the stage, including an actor’s major injury, a weeklong postponement and the death of the playwright, Jon Lipsky. But when I finally got to see the show last Sunday, it was […]
Truth be told right out of the gate, I don’t consider Billy Elliot a great musical. It’s a wonderful story, I’ll grant you that, but Elton John is capable of so much better than the derivative music he puts forward for this adaptation of the hit film. The choreography is lovely but the direction somewhat […]
BU’s School of Theatre took on Julius Caesar last weekend, staging the homosocial epic in the unique Studio 102 space in the College of Fine Arts with a fifteen person all-female ensemble. It was an uneven production that made good use of space (the wonderfully dressed up studio was a feast for the detail-oriented eye) […]
I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see The Hotel Nepenthe. The description in the program sounds bizarre; it sounds scary and pretentious and weird. But I have never been so happy to have spent my night at the theatre. The Hotel Nepenthe is brilliant. Absolutely, positively, insanely (in all senses of the world) brilliant. […]
The Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s Winter Festival kicked off this month with Shakespeare’s excellent if obscure romance Cymbeline. There are only 3 performances left (tonight- Saturday Feb 19 at 8pm; and tomorrow- Sunday Feb 20, at 2pm and 7pm) but if you get a chance, this is not a production to be missed. The bench depth […]
The Independent Drama Society started on shaky ground. Founded by a bunch of BU grads newly ineligible for the theatre groups they’d come to love in college, IDS cobbled together its earliest productions, recruiting inexperienced players and volunteer tech teams to put on plays with few resources and small audiences. The result was some very […]
In Jane Carnwath’s production of Hedda Gabler this fall at Alumnae Theatre, Ibsen’s complex play about a caged animal of a woman was done excellent justice. Using Judith Thompson’s clever translation, the company effectively turned the beautifully intimate studio theatre into a claustrophobic den of domesticity in which Sochi Fried’s Hedda spiraled into fascinating madness. […]