Theater

Arts

Zip: Two Boots Brings Bawdiness to Bard With Filthy Gorgeous Burlesque

By Robert Warren You can pull all the stops out ‘till they call the cops out, Grind your behind till you're banned. But you gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get a hand! -- Miss Mazeppa, from the Sondheim/Styne musical Gypsy “It’s high time we

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Arts

Review: "Clybourne Park" at Barrington Stage

There's a new word -- "authentrification" -- that developers in New York City are using to justify renovating buildings that once served low-income communities and turning them into "authentic" hangouts for free-spending hipsters. Is this awesome or awful? The vicissitudes of gentrification are at

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Arts

Frenemies, A Love/Hate Story: "Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah" at Barrington Stage

Photos by Kevin SpragueBy Jeremy D. Goodwin With friends like this, who needs enemies? The simplest reference to famed literary frenemies F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway conjures a sense of Jazz Age glamour, a romantic notion of novelists as pop stars, living off the largesse of their rich friends

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Arts

Ghost Adventures: Edith Wharton Live (and in Spirit) at the Mount

By Sarah Ellen Rindsberg It’s time to visit your stately but inviting neighbor in the Berkshires: Edith Wharton. Although the esteemed writer will not be there in the flesh to greet you, her spirit reigns in more ways than one. Which is a good thing: she was a lovely

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Arts

Olympia Dukakis Still Has the "Courage" in Her

Play photos by Enrico SpadaBy Jeremy D. Goodwin When tackling the works of its namesake playwright, Shakespeare & Company puts the text of a play at the forefront but otherwise makes no obeisance to inherited notions about how a given play is "supposed" to be staged. So as

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Arts

Pygmalion at Williamstown: Tis Pity She’s A Short Run

Photos by T Charles EricksonBy Scott Baldinger An impressively scaled neoclassical facade representing the opera house at Covent Garden, painted in a combination of pastel colors with mauve-toile surrounds, is the foreground of the first scene of Williamstown Theatre Festival’s brilliantly fresh and tantalizing production of Pygmalion, where Professor

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Arts

No Witnesses: Karen Allen Goes To Necessary Extremes

All photos by Abby LePageBy Nichole Dupont If you're looking for a light comedy or an offbeat musical to cap off a perfect summer night in the Berkshires, then Extremities (directed by Karen Allen at Berkshire Theatre Group's Unicorn Theatre now through July 27) is not

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Arts

At Shakespeare & Company: Much to Love in This "Labour"

Photos by Kevin SpragueBy Jeremy D. Goodwin Near the top of Shakespeare & Company's stylish, urbane production of Love's Labour’s Lost, a mysterious warrior goddess enters a king's richly appointed study, cueing an enchanting, slow-motion sword fight. (Susan Dibble and Edgar Landa are

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Arts

The Rhinebeck Writers Retreat: A Modern Medici's Gift to the Fabulous Invalid

By Robert Burke Warren Photo courtesy of Second Stage Theatre When it comes to creating art, inspiration is only a fraction of the process. Artists also contend with time constraints, isolation, and financial woes, especially in aggressively capitalist, crowded, notoriously noisy New York City. Musical theater folks have it particularly

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Arts

Theater: "Heroes" (and the Heroes of "On The Town")

By Scott Baldinger As a funny sage once remarked, eighty percent of success is just showing up. In the case of the theater, this comment could be amended to say that, while showing up certainly helps, half of success is picking the right material for the moment. In the last

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Arts

Go Gershwin! "The Way You Wear Your Hat" at TriArts Sharon Playhouse

By Robert Burke Warren Not many musicians can unseat a diva, much less an entire evening of divas, but TriArts Sharon Playhouse artistic director John Simpkins says composer George Gershwin is the man for the job. The venerable Sharon, Connecticut theater usually opens its summer season with an all-female revue

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Arts

Old-Timey Future Rock: The Lisps Present "Futurity" at MASS MoCA

Indie rockers do not often traffic in hope, but the Lisps are not your run-of-the-mill, irony-wielding indie combo. With their acclaimed Civil War-era steampunk rock musical Futurity, at MASS MoCA on Saturday, April 27th at 8 p.m., the Brooklyn-based band brings heartfelt storytelling to their mostly Tumblr-friendly audiences, while

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