Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production is a fine start to the company’s tenth aniversary season and an impressive realization of its founding mission statement — for this company, story and the actor’s craft trump directorial conceits.
Actors' Shakespeare Project
Fuse Theater Review: An Earnest “Troilus and Cressida”
We are a long way from the love-destroyed-by-hostility pieties of Romeo and Juliet, but Actors’ Shakespeare Project director Tina Packer wants to make Troilus and Cressida fit into that reassuring and earnest mold.
Theater Review: Hotel Nepenthe — Rooms with a Comically Existential View
Hard luck stories and ghostly characters flit in and out of the creepy yet elegant Hotel Nepenthe, an antique nest where guests are given leopard skin coats while they await their existential fates, sometimes lying in the bathtub. “For its own interests, humor should take its outings in grave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened […]
Theater Review: Notes on Shakespeare as a Bare Bard
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.
Coming Attractions in Theater: February 2011
A hold-onto-your seat month with some intriguing world premieres, including a musical version of a Korean folktale, an attempt to turn Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound into a rock event, and a cerebral confab featuring Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli. By Bill Marx. King Lear by William Shakespeare. Directed by Michael Grandage. NT Live screens the […]
Coming Attractions in Theater: October 2010
October brings in epics from the classics (Shakespeare and Dickens), ghost stories from the classics (Poe, Henry James), a tragicomedy from a classic (O’Neill), and a comedy from a classic (Ben Jonson). Annie Baker, Ethan Coen, and the Rude Mechanicals provide some welcome respite from the tried-and-true. Given the state of the economy and the […]
Theater Review: A Timely ‘Timon of Athens’
This Shakespearean drama is savage and sour, its astringent vision of anger as the sole motive for living anticipating the death’s head satire of Swift, Céline, Thomas Bernhard, and Samuel Beckett. Timon of Athens, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Bill Barclay. Presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at the Midway Studio, Boston, MA, through June 13, […]
Coming Attractions in Theater: May 2010
By Bill Marx The month contains plenty of summerish entertainment, from a new baseball musical to a campy Alfred Hitchcock parody and a jazzy update of The Mikado. For me, the standouts are the more demanding fare, such as a festival of new American theater pieces and an exciting opportunity see Shakespeare’s rarely staged Timon […]
Coming Attractions in Theater: March 2010
Highlights on stage this month include the world premiere of a drama about evolution by a respected local playwright and an intriguing collection of plays and musicals that bring an unusual perspective to topics ranging from love and music to extinction and dehumanization. And the wait is over: a show featuring singing dinosaurs has arrived. […]