Our Town by Thorton Wilder is a deceptively simple play to perform, famously requiring neither set nor scenery and few props, and for this reason is popular as a staple of local theater groups – who often perform it badly. Wilder’s stated intent was to strip theater to its essence, meaning that the burden falls […]
The newly refurbished AS220 black box at 95 Empire is still familiar, but very finely polished and cleaned up around the edges. Upon entering, the set is what looks to be a chic New York loft. It’s become part of the experience with any Counter Productions show that the set is a fully fleshed-out character […]
One of musical theater’s favorite masked men returns to Providence Performing Arts Center (PPAC) courtesy of the touring company of Phantom of the Opera. The blockbuster Andrew Lloyd Webber musical will play March 21 – 31 and will include the songs “Think of Me,” “The Music of the Night,” and “All I Ask of You.” Jordan Craig […]
Some plays are simply comfort food – warm, satisfying and faintly nostalgic. Joe DiPietro’s cleverly sentimental Over The River and Through The Woods falls squarely in this category and manages to rise above its own tropes (Italian families love food, the amusing frailties of senior citizens, etc.) often enough to enjoy it on its own […]
Motif recently caught up with Lynne Collinson, founder and creative director of WomensWork, a creative collective designed to provide theatrical opportunities for women, particularly women over the age of 40 Their remarkable production of Susan Miller’s autobiographical drama My Left Breast, which ran at Artists’ Exchange back in October, is making a return engagement at the […]
“We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?” “Come buy,” call the goblins Hobbling down the glen. – Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti Rebecca Maxfield’s Head Trick Theatre concludes its 2018-19 season with Goblin Market, the musical theater adaptation […]
Now in his second season as artistic director of Jamestown Community Theatre (JCT), Richard Martin is not shy about his love of Sondheim/Lapine’s beloved “fractured fairy tale” of a musical, Into the Woods. “It’s my favorite musical in the whole world,” he said enthusiastically. “If you’re not the sort of person who loves this show, […]
[Because of the length of this review, this is the first of two parts: the first part provides an overview of the production and the second part provides some additional detailed historical analysis of the script.] Judaism is ultimately about lineage: Every Jew stands at the current endpoint of more than 3,000 years of history, and almost […]
[Because of the length of this review, this is the second of two parts: the first part provides an overview of the production and the second part provides some additional detailed historical analysis of the script.] After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, their goal of creating what they called a “race-based state” immediately led […]
In Tom Dulack’s Breaking Legs at the Arctic Playhouse, college professor Terrence O’Keefe (Jeff Blanchette) has written a play-within-a-play whose goal is to make the audience feel as if they committed a murder, giving them a sense of what that would really feel like. After getting good reviews in Belgium and Buffalo, presumably getting a taste of […]