Theater
Two recent productions of Shakespeare, one a heralded London staging at the Donmar Warehous heading to New York in April, the other an Actors’ Shakespeare Project presentation in Davis Square, provide examples of the strengths and weaknesses of tackling the Bard without frills.
As long as the wizardly spell of dramatist Mark O’Rowe’s creative versification stays strong, Terminus holds you firmly in its slip-slimy grip. The nimble verse is rappy and snappy, a sort of slangy, obscene, sing-song rhyme (with some breath-taking vocal syncopation) that accentuates rather than undercuts the dark doings of the play, at least for…
April promises some provocative theater, from new plays at the Huntington Theatre Company and the Charlestown Working Theater to opportunities to hear a steamy script by Shakespeare contemporary Thomas Middleton and to take in the Elizabethan antics of BBC TV’s Blackadder on stage.
D.W. Jacobs’s presentation of the life and ideas of American visionary R. Buckminster Fuller invites you to make your own intellectual structure out of what you have seen—connect Fuller’s dots and you have an image that expands your mental horizons or at the very least ups your powers of analysis and recall. R. Buckminster Fuller:…
This musical/dance hybrid portrays Afrobeat originator Fela as a master entertainer and political agitator, an evening of terrific dance numbers nimbly performed and wonderful music played by first-rate musicians that ends on a suitably somber acceptance that with high flying dreams of freedom come bottom line responsibilities. FELA! Book by Jim Lewis and Bill T.…
Since its debut, the play Hysteria has been advertised as “in the comic tradition of Tom Stoppard,” blithely blending fact and fantasy, real life people and fictional characters into frothy fun. Unfortunately, Johnson is no Stoppard. Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis by Terry Johnson. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Presented by…
The tragicomic idea is that the existential futility of Franz Kafka’s world reflects life in the theater. The characters gloriously quixotic love for the stage battles against commercial greed, egomania, and psychological mess-ups. The Understudy by Theresa Rebeck. Directed by Larry Coen. Staged by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston at the 140 Clarendon Street…
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