Theater

Arts

From Great Barrington to Off Broadway: Here Comes "Castronauts"

"The reputation of the Berkshires' being a hideout for artists is true," says Bobby Houston, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker (Mighty Times: The Children's March, 2004), who moved to Great Barrington a few years ago from his longtime home in California. "Castronauts was born

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Arts

Review: "See Rock City" at Barrington Stage is Worth A Detour

If you're the type of person who worries about the future of American musical theater in the age of Disney on Broadway. hie yourself to Pittsfield where Barrington Stage Company's Musical Theater Lab is staging a thoroughly modern and all-American musical called See Rock City &

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Arts

Review: "Waiting for Godot" at Berkshire Theatre Festival

There's a reason why certain plays--the ones you read in high school and college--are part of the theatrical canon: They are timeless dramas that explore universal truths or ponder eternal questions about human nature. By any standard, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is one of the

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Arts

Review: "Of Thee I Sing" at Bard

If friends call you this weekend and offer you their extra ticket to Of Thee I Sing, which has been sold out for weeks, say, "Yes!" The only disappointing thing about this revival of the 1931 Gershwins' musical comedy at Bard Summerscape is the brevity of its

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Arts

Theatre: Why Noël Now?

Is it coincidence or harmonic convergence that  Barrington Stage Company and Berkshire Theatre Festival are both ending their main stage seasons with plays by Noël Coward, the most urbane of playwrights? According to the theater companies' artistic directors, it was the availability of key players that led them to

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Arts

"The Violet Hour" Gets a Radiant Production at Barrington Stage Company

When Richard Greenberg's play The Violet Hour opened on Broadway at the newly refurbished Biltmore Theater in 2003, New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote that it was an "example of the funk that descends when bad casting happens to good plays." Now, Barrington Stage has

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Arts

Summer Stock: Staying Alive (Part II)

The Mac-Haydn in Chatham is not the only barn in our region where you can see musical theater with high production values, vigor and pluck. TriArts at the Sharon Playhouse stages three musicals every summer with a unique formula that combines first-rate regional and community theater: a couple of professional

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Arts

Whatever Happened to Summer Stock?

It's alive and well at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, NY. Going to see a show at this 350-seat theater is like entering a time machine. It transports you to the Catskills of Marjorie Morningstar, where bright-eyed Broadway hopefuls would spend the summer at hotels or camps and

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Arts

A Star is Born? Finn Wittrock in "Candida" at Berkshire Theatre Festival

Annette Miller was hoping to be proved right. When she heard that native son Finn Wittrock was starring in Candida at Berkshire Theatre Festival, she wanted to see if he had lived up to his potential. "When he was ten years old, he used to run lines with me

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Arts

Spelling Bee's H-O-M-E-C-O-M-I-N-G

William Finn has travelled from Broadway to the Berkshires and back again many times. Now he's here with his Tony Award winning musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which has returned to its birthplace, Barrington Stage Company (where it plays through July 12.)  Finn first musicalized

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Arts

Theatre Review: "The Ladies Man" at Shakespeare & Company

You, gentle theatergoer, play an integral role in the success of a farce. First, you must accept the slim premise based on mistaken identities and little white lies. You need to accept that a bourgeois house could have a room with only one window but five doors that never fall

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Arts

Theater Review: "I Am My Own Wife"

Julianne Boyd, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company, is nothing if not audacious. For her first show of the season, she chose a play that sounds like a hard sell for a bourgeois Berkshires audience: I Am My Own Wife (a hit on Broadway in 2003), which is the

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