The Lyric Stage Company of Boston’s production can’t quite get its arms around all of the varied elements in this exhilarating musical, but some terrific performances make up for other weaknesses.
May 202013
May 182013
The ebullient entertainer Maurice Hines held court this week at a packed Cutler Majestic Theater, along with a score of other very talented musicians and tap dancers. What an evening!
May 172013
Despite its aura of “Gidget Goes Hawaiian,” and the profusion of cute props like rubber duckies and ukeleles, The Hypocrites’ production is smart enough not to mess (too much) with the original score and lyrics.
May 112013
The Zeitgeist Stage Company provocatively lives up to its name by taking audiences into the netherworld of horrific violence via a powerful production of Simon Stephens’ drama “Punk Rock.”
May 092013
Something emotional (perhaps even passionate) whirls underneath the well-worn modernist pieties of “Old-Fashioned Prostitutes,” though not to the point of disrupting the daffy routine.
May 012013
Simultaneously storyteller and player, ancient character and modern respondent, Denis O’Hare’s performance of “An Iliad” elicits the kind of respect automatically granted this genre of demanding monologual performance.
Apr 262013
Early birds will be served what looks like a promising treat when Bashir Lazhar receives its American premiere courtesy of the Barrington Stage Company.
Apr 182013
“She Kills Monsters” provides a constant stream of creative, amusing, and outrageous moments.
Apr 122013
But if a dramatist butchers everything – what will can be put in its place? In the case of “M” it is nothing; nothing I can see or understand.
Apr 092013
“By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” suggests the dismissive attitude the public has toward African American actors, but the script doesn’t go far enough to make its title character three-dimensional.
Apr 062013
The chief glory of the Lyric Stage production: an ensemble of eight actors that agilely accents the humor dramatist Lynn Nottage utilizes to temper her examination of the darker racial and political subtexts of the period.
Apr 052013
Bianco Amato is a marvel as Anton Chekov’s widow, Olga Knipper, who can turn her fake emotions on a ruble.
Mar 222013
Are those who merely stand and watch as guilty as those who drop the bombs, pull the triggers, or run the trains? The question is no less relevant today than more than sixty years ago.
Mar 152013
Director Liesl Tommy’s unflinching approach gives Lorraine Hansberry’s classic a surprising urgency more than half a century after the drama first played on Broadway.
Mar 122013
Whether or not there’s a real lover, or whether all of this is an elaborate fantasy is beside the point. For Harold Pinter, it may all be the same thing.
Mar 102013
“Clybourne Park” was expressly written to be in conversation with Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” The former gives us a new perspective — actually new perspectives — on the latter.
Mar 082013
In Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer prize-winning play “Clybourne Park,” resentment and racism chafe at the thin veneer of polite pleasantries.
Mar 022013
Both authors generate humor out of the casual inhumanity of the bourgeoise, dramatizing how the farce of middle class success distorts its victors and victims.