This summer, between beating the heat with trips to the beach and Del’s lemonades, consider adding a play or two to your summer bucket list. Among the offerings from local theaters, there’s a little something for everyone, from our Shakespeare scholars to our musical theater aficionados. First and foremost, nothing screams summer theater quite like […]
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 hit Broadway in the wake of Hamilton, and it was unlike anything else the Great White Way had ever seen. It completely transformed the Imperial Theater where it took up residency for just shy of a year from your standard-faire proscenium stage into a cabaret with onstage […]
“Once in a lifetime” is how Nashville music producer Sam Phillips described the December night in 1956 when music legends Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley gathered in his Sun Records studio and jammed. The play capturing that session, Million Dollar Quartet, helps Theatre by the Sea relaunch production after a […]
Shakespeare wove wisps of fanciful fairies, enchanted forests and dreams of love throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Director Fred Sullivan Jr. and The Gamm Theatre pushed the fantasy world into overdrive for a production that teleports the audience to a land of sweetness, laughter and passion. Gamm ends its 37th season with its first-ever […]
Thursday was opening night of the North American Tour of Lincoln Center Theater’s critically acclaimed production of My Fair Lady, a musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. This being a Broadway production at PPAC, directed by Bartlett Sher, you surely don’t want to miss it! Disregard Hepburn’s classic movie and prepare yourself for a truly new and […]
Some plays are difficult to understand or follow, and don’t adhere to the basics of plot development with protagonists and antagonists facing off before jaunting happily off into the sunset. Sueño, now on stage at Trinity Repertory Company, is just such a piece, seemingly airy and darkly comedic on some levels yet complex and multi-layered […]
Teen angst – heck, angst in general – has never felt as raw and overwhelming as in the first act of the Tony Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. On stage at the Providence Performing Arts Center – two years after it was rescheduled due to the pandemic – the production is a magical blend of […]
The premise – a Polish blues musician, a frustrated factory worker, a misunderstood prep student and a blustery Italian mailman meet at a bus stop – sounds like the lead-in to a joke instead of 95 minutes that might change your outlook on life. Ironbound, a gritty play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Martyna Majok, peeks at […]
The story of how the musical Be More Chill came to see its day on Broadway speaks to the digital age and the power of a dedicated cult-following. After the first production in 2015 received mixed reviews, it seemed the show was dead in the water. Two years later, the show was resurrected as it […]
I recently read an article online that posed the question, “Can’t Broadway just be for fun?” The article stepped into the debate on perhaps the biggest existential question at the heart of theatre: should theatre be a means of escapism or an instrument for social change? The Prom is a show that demonstrates it does […]