On March 28, the Biltmore Ballroom of the Graduate Providence Hotel will be the most swankified place in town for any Broadway geek to hear the people sing, as the Providence Singers will give their regards to Broadway in Broadway at the Biltmore, a gala of musical theater favorites of the 20th century, from George […]
They’re not the pin-ups you’d expect to see adorning the pages of a calendar, but the women of Yorkshire’s Women’s Institute bare all for a worthy cause. Calendar Girls, currently being performed by Pawtucket’s Community Players under the direction of Pamela Jackson, is the stage adaptation of the 2003 film starring Helen Mirren and Julie […]
There’s Scottish music, wild drunken karaoke antics and Hell. If there was a word to describe Prudencia Hart’s undoing, “strange” is it. After years of waiting for the performance rights, Wilbury Theatre Group is finally bringing this wild ride, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (directed by Brien Lang), to the stage (and a few […]
Parade is an ironically cheery title for a musical that is unapologetically dark. Based on a true and pivotal event in American legal, social and political history, Parade dramatizes the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent accused of murdering a factory worker under his employ. The events surrounding the trial lead to […]
Dysfunctional families are pretty much a dime-a-dozen on stage. In Clare Barron’s You Got Older, however, the dysfunction is not attributed to family, but to life in its many ups and downs and unexpected turns. While my first thought was to compare this play to other shows that revolve around family — Fun Home, a […]
Competition, jealousy and uncertainty plague all pre-teen girls, but in few places are they more pronounced than on a competitive dance team. Playwright Clare Barron exploits the tensions teeming within both to craft a visceral and explosive exploration of adolescence in Dance Nation, which the Wilbury Theatre Group is presenting (directed by Angela Brazil) in […]
Shirley Jackson’s gothic horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is considered one of the best ghost stories published in the 20th century. Jackson was inspired after reading the reports of a group of psychic researchers’ study of a supposedly haunted house. It was not, however, the paranormal happenings the researchers described, but the researchers […]
If you’ve never heard of the Academy Players’ latest production, Imaginary, you’re not alone. A venture commissioned and produced by National Youth Music Theatre, the musical first made its debut in London in 2017. Its history is not a long one — short enough that posters still declare it “a new musical” – and it […]
In 1991, tensions between the African-American and Hasidic Jewish populations of Crown Heights, Brooklyn erupted into riots following the death of a 7-year-old Caribbean-American boy when a car driven by a Jewish man veered onto the sidewalk and the subsequent stabbing of a young Jewish scholar. Enter Anna Deavere Smith — playwright, author, actress and […]
On the very same day the Spectrum Theatre Ensemble opened its production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Wilbury Theatre, in the kind of irony the poets dream of, the president expressed a desire to reopen mental institutions in order to combat mass shootings – the likes of which were largely shut […]
