.JPG)
.gif)
Review: “A Delicate Balance” at BTF
Through September 4
Edward Albee’s 1967 Pultizer Prize winning A Delicate Balance is a tragedy that masquerades as a drawing room comedy. It is laced with laugh-out-loud moments and it builds through its three acts to reveal devastating truths about the nature of family and friendship. It is such a well-written, slyly constructed play that its sucker punch hits you without your really being ready, and you leave the theater with a clear sense that the delicate balance we all try to maintain in our lives is always at risk. BTF’s production doesn’t overindulge in histrionics, but there are some excellent performances, especially Maureen Anderman as Agnes, the well-bred matriarch who is desperately trying to maintain the status quo, is authoritative in every way, and Jonathan Hogan as her husband, who is so low key and natural that it doesn’t feel like he’s acting, but he clearly is when he delivers his final consciousness-raising monologue. Directed with restraint by David Auburn, this production of A Delicate Balance manages to be both entertaining and unnerving, which is exactly what you want from a night at the theater.
Berkshire Theatre Festival
Stockbridge, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/25/10 at 10:43 AM • Permalink
Review: “The Memory Show” at Barrington Stage Company
Through August 29
The Memory Show is not really a conventional musical, even though the 75 minute show (with book & lyrics by Sara Cooper and music by Zach Redler) is almost entirely sung. It is really a play whose rapid-fire dialogue and soul-searching monologues are set to wonderful music. The story of a 31-year-old woman (Leslie Kritzer) who returns home to take care of her mentally unstable mother (Catherine Cox) who now has Alzheimer’s too, the play, which is having its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company’s Musical Theatre Lab, has elements that make you think of the late Wendy Wasserstein (the reciprocal mother/daughter Jewish guilt and humor) as well as Edward Albee (the demented mother’s secret is for real and it compounds what is already a heartbreaking situation.) The songs are engrossing, hyper-articulate and polished—the kind of songs that BSC Musical Theater Lab director William Finn writes himself.
Of course, Finn and Stephen Sondheim have been pushing the American musical in all sorts of new directions for a long time, and The Memory Show takes a new path: a musical about Alzheimer’s is unchartered and terrifying territory. And so is “You and Me, Toilet,” a song that is sung to a commode and catalogs the horrors of caring for a loved one who can no longer care for herself. And “I’m Unlovable” is a song of self-awareness that makes one wonder if it’s better to be self-deluded. The smart, cozy set by Brian Prather includes a wall of floating picture frames—some with photos, some are empty—that represent the scattershot nature of the mother’s mind.
The Memory Show is intensely moving because it is such a simple, fraught tale: mother and daughter who need each other but don’t always like or understand each other. That it’s very funny, very sad but not sentimental in the least is an awesome accomplishment.
Barrington Stage Company
Pittsfield, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/25/10 at 10:38 AM • Permalink
“Absurd Person Singular” at Barrington Stage
Through August 29
It does not sound promising: a three-act (three-set) British comedy set in the dismal post-hippie, pre-Yuppie 1970s. But Barrington Stage Company has a knack for making the most of any play, and director Jesse Berger’s production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular is an amusing, lighthearted, carefree evening of theater. BSC favorite Christopher Innvar is especially fine as the groovy architect with a wandering eye, and Finnerty Steeves is impossibly funny as a women who is silently suicidal. And the divine Henny Russell is practically a one-woman show herself as the politely snobby, well-bred, well-dressed Marion.
Barrington Stage Company
Pittsfield, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/23/10 at 09:31 AM • Permalink
“Richard III” at Shakespeare & Company
Now through September 5 @ 7:30 p.m. in the Founders’ Theatre
John Douglas Thompson leads an all-star cast of familiar faces—Johnny Lee Davenport (Twelfth Night, Hamlet), Nigel Gore (Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet) and Annette Miller (Martha Mitchell Calling)in a new production of Richard III directed by Jonathan Croy.
Shakespeare & Company
Lenox, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/23/10 at 09:30 AM • Permalink
“Bad Dates” at Shakespeare & Company
Now through September 12
Elizabeth Aspenlieder, the best comic actress in the Berkshires, reprises her role as the shoe-obsessed, unlucky-at-love single mom in Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates. Even if you saw the lovable Lizzie in Bad Dates last year, you’ll want to see this production from a new director with a new set. This one-woman show is the ideal vehicle for the plucky, madcap Aspenlieder.
Shakespeare & Company
Lenox, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/23/10 at 09:23 AM • Permalink
“The Amorous Quarrel” at Shakespeare & Co.
June 23 - August 28 @ the Rose Footprint Theatre
The family-friendly, outdoor Bankside Festival features Molière’s wild, knock-about comedy, The Amorous Quarrel, with original music by Andy Talen. Each performance consists of a complete production of the show at the outdoor, tented Rose Footprint Theatre, the future site of S&Co.’s historically accurate re-creation of Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre. Shows are held Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 5:30pm. Tickets are free for children 18 years and younger, and $10 for adults.
Shakespeare & Company
Lenox, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/23/10 at 09:23 AM • Permalink
Review: The Taster at Shakespeare & Company
Now through September 4
It has been too long a while since we’ve seen a play by Joan Ackermann at Shakespeare & Company, so the current staging of her literate new work, The Taster, at Founder’s Theatre, is particularly welcome. The play is a tale of two eras intertwined not only by a cast that plays parallel roles in both periods, but also by common themes, a clever, detailed set that does double duty, and a bit of mystical slippage from one century to the other.
Tom O’Keefe plays Henry, an investment banker whose life was upturned by the financial crisis, married to Claudia, an opera singer, whose paltry wages are now the couple’s sole income. Henry’s relief from despondence comes from translating an obscure Basque play set in the 16th century that tells the story of King Gregorio, his taster, and his queen, with whom he has failed to produce an heir.
O’Keefe is convincingly melancholy as Henry and mercurial as Gregorio. Berkshire audiences familiar with Maureen O’Flynn for her roles in local opera productions will be happy to know they will hear her sing as both the modern-day wife and as Queen Mariana. The star of this production is Rocco Sisto as the taster; he is a joy to watch in every moment onstage and his appearance as a nutritionist in one all-too-brief present–day scene brightens the proceedings. Ackermann’s oft-times poetic script is full of details about poisons, botanicals, and Basque language and lore, even as it avoids coming off like an anthropology or science lecture.
Shakespeare & Company, Founders’ Theatre
Lenox, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Bess Hochstein on 08/23/10 at 09:22 AM • Permalink
“Fifth of July” at Williamstown
Through August 22
It’s amazing how delightfully old-fashioned a play from the 1978 can be. Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July allows characters come in and out multiple time—to run up staircases and swing through screen doors, so that you get the feeling you are watching life rather than just a play. The story of a disabled (gay) Vietnam vet who is not sure whether to stay in his family’s magnificent rural Missouri house or sell it to his old college friends, it takes you back to a time when plays were as influential as movies as societal bellwethers. The production at Williamstown has a magnificent, atmospheric set and is beautifully lit. The cast is uniformly strong, especially Kally Duling as the precocious 13-year-old June Tally, Shane McRae as the sensitive vet, Jennifer Mudge as the over-the-top Gwen, and Elizabeth Franz as Aunt Sally, the 64-year-old rock of the family. Directed by Steppenwolf Theatre co-founder Terry Kinney, Fifth of July is more expressive than explosive, a nuanced take on friends, family, love and betrayal.
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Williamstown, MA
(0) Comments
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/17/10 at 12:01 PM • Permalink
“The Last Goodbye” at Williamstown
Through August 20
Original rock-and-roll musicals like Hair and Rent have been big money makers, but if you start with an already successful album you have a built-in audience which is why Green Day’s American Idiot is such a hit on Broadway. And for fans of the late Jeff Buckley—who tragically died in a swimming accident in 1997 after releasing only one full-length, full-band studio album, GRACE, in 1994—the new musical The Last Goodbye is an innovative, dynamic tribute to his artistry. Director Michael Kimmel has adapted the text of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet and used Buckley’s arena-rock songs to create a score that is incendiary and bone-chilling. (This is West Side Story on crack and Special K.) Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” makes a haunting finale.
While the story of the lovers whose families are enemies is painfully familiar, the acting and choreography (by Sonya Tayeh) are raw, gutsy and mesmerizing. Most members of the cast have Broadway credits and strong voices and their powerful performances are what one expects from WTF. Kris Kukul’s musical direction would play well at the Tony Awards, and don’t be surprised if this makes it to Broadway sooner rather than later. See it now, and you can brag that you saw it at WTF first.
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Williamstown, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/09/10 at 05:21 PM • Permalink
“Lombardi” is a Winner!
Through July 28 at The Mahaiwe
Football has not always been big business. Eric Simonson’s new play Lombardi, which is having its pre Broadway run at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, is set in 1965, when the most famous football coach in the land lived in an ordinary ranch house (which we see in a black and white photograph projected on the stage) and his wife hosted post-game parties with homemade crab dip in their basement rec room. It’s the exact same era as Mad Men—the celebrated TV show about the pre-feminist New York advertising world—and Judith Light as Marie Lombardi is the archetypal executive wife who finds solace in good clothes, cocktails and flirting with younger men (such as her husband’s players.) Light is so captivating—I kept thinking the subtitle of this play could be Long Day’s Journey into Green Bay—that you’re disappointed every time she exits the stage with her charm bracelet jingling. But Dan Lauria as Vince Lombardi is equally magnetic and he makes clear in a nuanced performance how a man so pig-headed in his obsession to win could be so loved by his players and indeed by the entire country.
Lombardi is the best type of nostalgia, because it captures, as the coach says himself, a time when “we played for pride.” It’s the time before Nike endorsement deals and before “gottcha” You Tube videos when magazine articles had the power to wound great men, which is why Lombardi is so wary of the Look magazine reporter played by Keith Nobbs who comes to spend a week shadowing him, trying to figure out the Lombardi mystique. Using a reporter to tell the story is effective, because it shows how both journalism and football have been corrupted and infected by show business values over the past decades. The eternal joy and beauty of football is the magic of eleven guys working as one with a common purpose, and it’s the same whether you’re on the high school junior varsity or in the Super Bowl. There’s nothing sweeter than a victory shared. And it’s the same thing with a well-cast, well-written and well-directed play, which Lombardi most definitely is. When it arrives on Broadway in the fall, it’s destined for a championship season.
Lombardi at the Mahaiwe
Great Barrington, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/24/10 at 10:34 AM • Permalink
“Spelling Bee” at TriArts
We only saw the first half of director Andrew Volkoff’s version of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee because a storm knocked out the power at the Sharon Playhouse. But what we did see was funny and fresh—even though we’ve seen this show three other times with three other casts. Never have the kids seemed so much like kids and not adults playing kids, which heightens the ridiculousness of the spelling competition. Spelling Bee is one of those shows that adults enjoy as much as their tweens and teens, and it never fails to amaze that the audience participation aspect of the show always works.
TriArts
Sharon, CT
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/20/10 at 10:03 PM • Permalink
Review: “Judgment Day” at Summerscape
Through July 25 at the Fisher Center at Bard College
To begin by praising the set, props and sound design of the 1937 drama Judgment Day at Bard Summerscape should not be misinterpreted: This is an extraordinary evening of theatre in every respect, but the awesome stagecraft powerfully serves the story of a rules-following stationmaster whose split-second mistake causes a disastrous train crash that kills 18 people and a small town’s subsequent attempt to determine guilt and find justice. The Fisher Center’s black box Theatre Two has been transformed into a tunnel-shaped amphitheater and the seats on both sides are high above the stage. Mimi Lien’s set moves slowly back and forth on tracks in several scenes, reinforcing the play’s theme that reality shifts based on one’s perspective—and one’s motives. When the first train comes rumbling by, you can feel the theater vibrate and get a visceral sense for the violent power of a coal-stoked locomotive barreling through town at full speed.
Though it’s set in Austria-Hungary in the late 1930s, Ödön von Horváth’s play (translated by Christopher Hampton) is a universal tale about small-town life, the rush to judgment, and the question of whether lying to protect another person is ever defensible or wise. The star of the angry mob is Kelly McAndrew’s Frau Leimgruber, the archetypal town gossip who’s unaware of the consequences of her selfish disregard. As the stationmaster, Herr Hudetz, the handsome Kevin O’Donnell is charming, frightening and utterly convincing. Frau Hudetz, his older, embittered and unstable wife, is played with intense passion by Stephanie Roth Haberle. Hayley Treider as the not-so-innocent Anna is pretty perfect in her pivotal role. The other performances are mostly strong, but it’s a bit unsettling that some actors use accents and others don’t. Nevertheless, director Caitriona McLaughlin has managed to make this small story have an epic feel, and she has the actors use every inch of the bowling alley set to great effect. It seems a shame that this play will only run for ten performances, because anybody who appreciates theater that is visually and intellectually stimulating and morally challenging should see this production of Judgment Day.
Judgment Day at Bard Summerscape
Annandale-on-Huson, NY
Through July 25
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/17/10 at 02:12 PM • Permalink
Review: “Six Degrees” at Williamstown
Through July 25
For anyone who is too young to remember 1980s New York as an era of smug money, John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation is a fascinating history lesson. As New York Times theater critic Frank Rich wrote, Six Degrees is “a masterwork that captures New York as Tom Wolfe did in Bonfire of the Vanities.” Based on the true story of a young African American con artist who not only pretends to be a prep-school friend of the children of several elite families but also the son of the barrier-breaking movie star Sidney Poitier, Six Degrees is a comedy of manners as well as a tragedy depicting how the best and the brightest lost a sense of themselves in the go-go 1980s.
The play is exquisitely constructed with flashbacks and monologues where characters directly address the audience, and WTF’s production is as sharp as Guare’s precise and hyper-articulate text. As Ouisa Kittredge, the conflicted bleeding heart matron, Margaret Colin could be mistaken for Stockard Channing who originated the role at Lincoln Center twenty years ago, As the con-artist Paul, Ato Essandoh is so sincere that you believe that he is the son of Sidney Poitier even though you know better. All of the younger actors are especially fine as they rage against their gullible parents. Of course, the play has become a period piece. Today, Ouisa would not have to go downtown to the Strand bookstore to buy a biography of Poitier to find out if he had a son named Paul; she would check Wikipedia on her iPhone. And Poitier himself no longer holds the same sacred place as a black film star now that actors like Denzel Washington and Will Smith are among the biggest stars on the planet. Still, Six Degrees remains a humorous, poignant evisceration of the Upper East Side elite and 90 minutes of first-rate theater.
Six Degrees of Separation at Williamstown Theatre Festival
Williamstown, MA
Through July 25
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/17/10 at 02:00 PM • Permalink
“Rocky Horror” in Rhinebeck
Through August 1
The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck continues on its unconventional-for-community-theater course. Following its smart and sassy productions of Rent and Falsettos earlier this year, the Center is staging The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the campy, erotic and subversive cult classic that encourages audience participation.
Center for Peforming Arts at Rhinebeck
Rhinebeck, NY
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/15/10 at 04:53 PM • Permalink
“Lombardi” Kicks Off at the Mahaiwe
July 22 - 28
Actor Dan Lauria will portray the Green Bay Packers coach on stage.
Millerton resident and New York Times best-selling author Peter Richmond, whose new book, Badasses:The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden’s Oakland Raiders (Harper Collins) will be published this fall, interviewed playwright Eric Simonson for RI on the eve of Lombardi‘s out-of-town tryout in Great Barrington. It begins previews at Circle-in-the-Square on September 23, with the Broadway opening set for October 21.
Lear, Loman . . . Lombardi? A legendary football coach as stage protagonist? Though the sporting world is no stranger to the Broadway stage—Damn Yankees used the backdrop of baseball to tell its Faustian tale, and Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize winning That Championship Season revolved around the reunion of a college basketball team—no one’s dared broach the gridiron. Eric Simonson, however, has always been drawn to unlikely subjects, whether he’s dramatizing the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, putting Ahab onstage or directing an Academy-Award-winning documentary about Norman Corwin, an obscure visionary of radio’s golden age. And for a Wisconsin farm kid who grew up watching Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers playing in the football temple of Lambeau Field, writing a play about the sport’s most storied coach was probably inevitable: the driven Lombardi’s successes vaulted him beyond the grid of sport, and into the pantheon of American icons—a territory Simonson loves to tread. “The most interesting thing to me,” he says by phone from Los Angeles, “is why they are all lone individuals. They’re saying something in such an original way that it makes them pioneers.”
In a way, Simonson belongs in that club. Writing a play about a man who lived, breathed and worshipped the game of football—without being able to show the beautiful brutality of the game itself—would figure to be, at the least, problematic. (Of course, Shakespeare couldn’t portray the battles in Macbeth, and the box-office returns have worked out pretty well for that one.) But capturing the soul of a football coach without showing any football? “You have to accept that you’re not going to do what a film would do: cut to the game, do a montage of how the game went,” says Simonson. “Instead, you focus on the characters and economize as much as possible, creating interesting characters who have obstacles in front of them when they’re trying to get something.”
A member of Chicago’s Famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Simonson was nominated for a directing Tony in 1993 for The Song of Jacob Zulu, and in 2006, he won that Oscar for his 40-minute film A Note of Triumph, the story of radio essayist Norman Corwin. For Lombardi, he drew on material from David Maraniss’s bestselling biography, When Pride Still Mattered, to debut a very different play two years ago for the Madison (Wisconsin) Repertory Theater. “The play I had written before was more weighted on ideas than action, more thought-provoking than entertaining,” he says. “It was a whimsical look into Lombardi’s subconscious.”
But when producers in New York showed interest in staging a more biographical Lombardi play last year, Simonson started over again, saving just one five-minute scene from the original. Eschewing the cradle-to-grave “biodrama” form he and co-writer Jeffrey Hatcher had used in Work Song their play about Wright, Simonson decided to limit the dramatic action to a single week, during which a journalist lives with Lombardi (Dan Lauria) and his wife, Marie (Judith Light), in search of a feature story. The reporter ends up finding out more about Lombardi’s inner life—as well as his own—than he bargained for. “He discovers that Lombardi will never be completely happy because he will never see his work reach complete perfection. And Lombardi infuses that philosophy into the reporter, inspires him to achieve the same kind of perfection in his own work.”
In Lombardi, the game is nothing more than the fabric into which Simonson has woven the character of an intense, complex, highly religious man whose searchings struck a universal chord for the author. “I see in the Jesuit philosophy a linking of perfection, a closeness to God, through work, that mirrors the philosophy of the culture of the country: the idea that if you work hard and pay your dues you will profit spiritually and economically,” says Simonson. “And Lombardi personified it. That’s at the core of why he’s such a cultural icon: he was striving for perfection. I do that in my life, and I see a lot of people who do that same thing—going after an impossible goal.”
Lombardi
July 22 - 28
Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center
Great Barrington, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/14/10 at 11:33 AM • Permalink
Will “Pool Boy” Be the Summer’s Splash Hit for Barrington Stage Company?
Poolside in Pittsfield: Reba Evenchik and Nikos Tsakalakos.
There are two swimming pools that played a crucial role in the genesis of Pool Boy, Nikos Tsakalakos’s musical that is having its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company’s Stage 2 (July 13 - August 8). One is the swimming pool at the Hotel Bel-Air, the five-star resort nestled near the clouds in Los Angeles’s fanciest neighborhood; the other is the swimming pool behind the stately red-brick house in Pittsfield’s fanciest neighborhood that belongs to Bruce and Reba Evenchik, a Barrington Stage trustee.
When Tsakalakos spent his first summer in Pittsfield four years ago as the aide-de-camp to Tony-winning composer William Finn—his professor at NYU who runs Barrington Stage Company’s Musical Theatre Lab—they often hung out at Evenchik’s pool, which is a short walk from the theater. “Reba basically has an open door policy for the cast and crew at Barrington Stage,” explains Tsakalakos, who bunked with the Evenchiks the following summer. “This is the Bel-Air of Pittsfield!” he says, sitting by the pool where he first started composing lyrics for “Poolside at the Hotel Bel-Air.”
Last summer,
I wasn’t writing songs.
I was serving Mai Tais and Mojitos,
And specialty burritos
To models in red thongs,
Using shiny silver tongs.
I was working poolside
At the Hotel Bel-Air
Keeping it together
Trying not to stare
Tsakalakos made the most of chauffeuring Finn around the Berkshires, fully aware that Finn birthed his hit Broadway musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, on BSC’s Stage 2 in 2004. “As we drove around, I would tell Bill stories about working at the Hotel Bel-Air, and he said to me, ‘That is what you should write about’.” After writing that first song, Tsakalakos performed it a few times at late-night cabarets in Pittsfield and audiences were enthusiastic and wanted more. “When Bill heard it, he told me, ‘That will be the final song in your musical’.”
Once he had an ending, Tsakalos had to find a beginning, and he asked his classmate Janet Allard to collaborate on the book and lyrics. They wrote a story about a pool boy named Nick who’s an aspiring singer-songwriter who is willing to compromise his morals to win favor—and a record contract—with the people who could make him a star: the Sultan of Nubei, the music mogul, his beautiful wife, her pretty young assistant, the fastidious hotel manager and the faux Japanese sushi chef. It’s a rock-and-roll musical that satirizes the LA lifestyle: The Graduate crossed with Rent.
Although Tsakalakos is a compelling cabaret performer (see video below of him singing at the Barrington Stage gala in June), he is pleased that his alter ego will be played by Jay Armstrong Johnson, who was recently on Broadway in Hair. “Bill and Julie Boyd [BSC’s artistic director] have gone all out,” he says. “It’s very difficult to get a new musical to this point, and I am very grateful to them. I love doing this away from the pressures of New York. You feel the creative spirit in the Berkshires running from Great Barrington to Williamstown.”
Like the fairy godmother in countless musicals, Evenchik says she knew that Tsakalakos was a singular talent the first time he sang “Poolside” for her in her backyard. “I had a sense he was onto something very special,” she says. “He has a passion that comes out in his music and lyrics. His songs reach a very deep level. Nikos is a very authentic person and that is reflected in what he writes. His songs not only stay in your mind, they stay in your heart.”
Pool Boy
July 13 - August 8
Barrington Stage Company Stage 2
Pittsfield, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/07/10 at 08:35 PM • Permalink
Review: A Fab “Forum” at Williamstown
Now through July 11
“Something familiar, something peculiar” are the opening lyrics of Stephen Sondheim’s 1962 musical comedy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but there’s probably never been a production this unexpectedly and delightfully peculiar. I was clueless about what was in store at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) until five minutes before the curtain when I overheard a gentleman of the old school mutter in the men’s room: “Forum was all about tits and togas when I first saw it on Broadway. I don’t see how they can do it with an all-male cast, but I will keep an open mind.”
If you’re open-minded, you are in for a fantastic treat. To give Forum a fresh spin, the young director Jessica Stone proposed to WTF artistic director Nicholas Martin that she could stage it with an all-male cast, but she has not turned this into a campy drag show. The unconventional casting has merely made you more aware that Borscht Belt comedy with its reliance on visual and verbal puns can be sidesplittingly funny when its performed with razor-sharp timing. As Psuedolus, Christopher Fitzgerald (who recently played the leprechaun on Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow) gives a star-turn that’s as astonishingly riveting even if you’ve see this show many times before. But to say he’s the star does a disservice to the rest of the cast who are uniformly excellent and play their roles as if the gods had dictated that they were fated to triumph on the WTF stage. With a 16-piece orchestra in the pit, Sondheim’s score (the first for which he wrote both music and lyrics) sounds lush, almost symphonic. But the best sound of all is the laughter that ricochets off of the walls of the ‘62 Center from the opening curtain to the final bows. Laughing together with 500 other people for two hours is something peculiar and familiar indeed.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Williamstown, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/04/10 at 11:54 AM • Permalink
“The Wedding Singer” at TriArts
June 24 - July 13
You can always count on a great live band at the musicals staged at TriArts Sharon Playhouse, and the band is an integral part of the family friendly production of The Wedding Singer that congers up the glory days of the 1980s.
TriArts
Sharon, CT
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/23/10 at 05:54 AM • Permalink
“Sweeney Todd” at Barrington Stage
Now through July 17
When Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd opened on Broadway in 1979, New York Times critic Ricard Eder wrote: “The musical and dramatic achievements of Stephen Sondheim’s black and bloody Sweeney Todd are so numerous and so clamorous that they trample and jam each other in that invisible but finite doorway that connects a stage and its audience . . . .an endlessly inventive, highly expressive score that works indivisibly from his brilliant and abrasive lyrics.” BSC artistic director loves the challenges of re-staging great musicals, and she has had great success in recent years with Follies, West Side Story and Carousel. Now, she’s done it again with Sweeney Todd, which feels fresh and alive despite its familiarity. With Jeff McCarthy giving a muscular yet oddly sympathetic performance in the title role, Boyd has another hit on her hands.
Barrington Stage Company
Pittsfield, MA
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/21/10 at 03:05 PM • Permalink
“Women of Will” at Shakespeare & Company
Now - July 24 at 2:00 pm / 7:30 pm
Does anybody in the world understand all of Shakespeare’s women better than Tina Packer? The founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company (with help from Nigel Gore) explores the bard’s chronological portrayal of female characters in this American premiere of Women of Will in the Founders’ Theatre..
Shakespeare & Company
Lenox, MA
