Theatre
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Out of the Mouths of Babes
Israel Horovitz Play at Gloucester Stage
By: - Aug 28th, 2017Forty years ago playwright Israel Horovitz was a founder of Gloucester stage which has produced many of his 70 plus plays. Many have Gloucester settings but the latest Out of the Mouths of Babes is a part of a Parisian trilogy with one more to go. It was produced last summer at Cherry Lane in Manhattan. It is having its New England premiere in Gloucester and debuts in London this fall.
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Dell'Arte's Calisto and Cunning Vixen
Two Worlds Mix and Match in Opera
By: - Aug 26th, 2017Separated by almost three hundred the years, the full productions of Dell’Arte’s annual festival both looked at how two worlds mix and match in Calisto and The Cunning Vixen. Both productions were at once delightful and moving.
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Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble Untamed
Impeccable Opera Produced with Verve
By: - Aug 25th, 2017Opera is a form comprised of many elements. Seldom are all of them addressed successfully. Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble succeeds in producing intriguing and complex theater with attention to every detail. How do they do it, opera after opera, concert after concert?
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Shorts Gone Wild in South Florida
Annual Short Play Festival at times a hoot
By: - Aug 22nd, 2017Audiences choose the order of the plays in annual "Shorts" festival. Actors bring comic energy to roles in production of popular theatrical event. Relevance not hard to spot in largely-escapist shows
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Robin Hood the Musical by Kem Ludwig
World Premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre
By: - Aug 21st, 2017San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre has the honor of mounting the World Premiere of Ken Ludwig’s newest comedy/farce “Robin Hood”, deftly directed by longtime stage and TV veteran Jessica Stone.
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Ivan Fischer's Don Giovanni
Mozart at his Most Sublime
By: - Aug 20th, 2017Ivan Fischer, the great Hungarian conductor, returns to Mozart's original version of Don Giovanni. Putting on a production from the Don's point of view, everything is a body. Furniture, peasants, chorus all are wearing white body suits and often strike arresting poses. This concept invites us to listen more closely to the terrific Budapest Festival Orchestra and the singers.
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Sophie Treadwell's 1928 Machinal
Chicago's Greenhouse Theater Center,
By: - Aug 19th, 2017Machinal, a new production of a neglected 1928 play by Sophie Treadwell at the Greenhouse Theater Center, is stunning in its balletic staging and the nuanced performance of Heather Crisler, playing the Young Woman.
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Hamlet in San Diego
Lowell Davies Outdoor Festival Theatre
By: - Aug 16th, 2017“Hamlet” once again graces the Lowell Davies Outdoor Festival stage as part of the Old Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival. The ‘melancholy Dane’ and his travails is crisply directed by the Old Globe’s Erna Finci Viterbi artistic director Barry Edelstein, who caps off another winning season of plays and musicals selected and produced under his stewardship.
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Company by Stephen Sondheim
Stunning Revival at Barrington Stage Company
By: - Aug 15th, 2017This season Julianne Boyd has taken another crack at Sondheim's Company and critics appear to be unanimous that a sensational production is on the short list of her best work. She is noted for loving musicals and this one is a corker.
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Broken Box Mime Theater in Bennington
Brooklyn Based Ensemble on Tap
By: - Aug 15th, 2017Award-wining ensemble, Broken Box Mime Theater will host an Open Studio Share at the Bennington Center for the Arts on Sunday, August 27 at the conclusion of a week-long residency
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True West Explodes in Ft. Lauderdale
Late Sam Shepherd's Play in Florida
By: - Aug 14th, 2017New City Players presents a blazing production of True West. The Sam Shepherd play sizzles in sunny, suffocating South Florida Expect plenty of fireworks in powerfully acted production.
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Actually at Williamstown Theatre Festival
Maat the Ancient Egyptian Feather of Truth
By: - Aug 14th, 2017At the end of a night of binge drinking the Princetown freshmen Tom (Joshua Boone) and Amber (Alexandre Socha) hook up. In the clear night of morning was she raped?. They were so drunk that neither can recall details. It is up to a review panel of faculty to hear both sides and decide on appropriate action. It is a poignant and timely issue as lives are in the balance on college campuses all over America.
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Ian Bostridge Reimagines Winterreise
Mostly Mozart Offers Hans Zender's Interpretation
By: - Aug 12th, 2017Netia Jones has combined tenor Ian Bostridge's thirty year passion and a brilliant "compositional interpretation" of the piano music for orchestra into a hydra-headed tour de force with video, sets and the suggestion of cabaret. Bostridge has the perfect voice for the wanderer, a stranger at the start and at the end. The staging works well.
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The Curious Dog in Los Angeles
All the Bells and Whistles for Ahmanson Theastre Production
By: - Aug 11th, 2017To help the audience experience what takes place inside the head of Christopher, director Elliott employs the full technical arsenal of the Ahmanson that is available to her. The set design by Bunny Christie, is a huge three sided space staging area with colored LED lights both on the walls and the floor that are cued by Christopher’s dialogue and stage movement. It’s all very technical and very eye-popping. In a transfer from Lodon “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” won a Tony Award in 2015.
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Hamlet Opera in Oakland
West Edge Opera at the Pacific Pipe Warehouse
By: - Aug 11th, 2017Much of the criticism of this work is noteworthy but inappropriate. Complainers argue that the opera misses much of the play, which must be expected unless you want a five-hour opera. This is the same argument people use when they’ve read a long book and then see the movie.
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The Chastity Tree by West Edge Opera
Pacific Pipe Warehouse In Oakland
By: - Aug 09th, 2017The music of The Chastity Tree is very much of its time and place. From the classic era, it still embraces baroque traces in tinkling harpsichord and clipped recitatives. The Bay Area is blessed with and attracts an abundance of great young opera singers, and West Edge always casts well from this enviable pool.
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Shakespeare in Love
Oregon Shakespeare Festival Premieres Play from Movie
By: - Aug 09th, 2017Shakespeare-centric theater companies like Oregon Shakes must provide a balance of Elizabethan era works with other offerings to attract sufficient audiences. Sometimes, a hybrid, and especially a sophisticated comedy that is about Shakespeare or one of his plays can be well received. So it is with Shakespeare in Love, the U.S. premiere of the stage version of the highly successful film.
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Blues Is a Woman
Custom Made in San Freancico
By: - Aug 09th, 2017After development at music venues, the musical revue "Blues is a Woman" has begun a theatrical run at Custom Made Theater in San Francisco. In a memorable production, six women wail and moan and plead in a rewarding evening of blues standards and original music by lead singer Pamela Rose in a format that is as informative as it is entertaining.
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Hair in Chicago
Revisiting the Age of Aquarius
By: - Aug 08th, 2017A half century later in the spirit of the Summer of Love there is a revival of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. Two and a half generations of later it still casts magical spells. Nancy Bishop takes on a trip down memory lane.
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Hannah and the Dread Gazebo by Jiehae Park
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
By: - Aug 08th, 2017Jiehae Park’s innovative and fast moving world premiere play, Hannah and the Dread Gazebo, touches on a dizzying number of themes including familial relationships, aspirations, wishes, creation mythology, international relations, cross-culturalism, and even a humorous twist on racism.
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Informed Consent in South Florida
Play Pitting Science vs. Religion in Coral Gables
By: - Aug 08th, 2017Issue-packed, yet taut play receives strong production at suburban Miami's GableStage. Informed Consent is unsettling, but is leavened with humor and optimism. Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer directs a talented quintent of performers in a riveting production of her play.
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This by Melissa James Gibson
Theatrical Thirty-Something Sitcom at Barrington Stage
By: - Aug 07th, 2017Moving on from an endemic fixations with plays about milennials Barrington Stage has progressed by a generation with This by Melissa James Gibson. The focus is on the trials and tribulations of friends who met in college. Add to this a dark and sexy stranger in a French doctor without borders,
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A Legendary Romance in Williamstown
Music and Lyrics, Geoff Morrow, Book, Timothy Prager
By: - Aug 06th, 2017This is the second producton of the musical A Legendary Romance with music and lyrics, Geoff Morrow, book by Timothy Prager. While it needs more work, the norm for musicals, starring Jeff McCarthy and Lora Lee Gayer it is the best work we have seen this season from Wiliamstown Theatre Festival. It is a tragic love story set to music about lives and careers ruined during the 1950s when Holywood was on trial for its alleged communism.
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Henry IV, Part One
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
By: - Aug 06th, 2017Director Lilean Blais-Cruz does well with limited resources. Actors extract whatever drama and humor that the words allow. Lighting and sound achieve expected OSF standards. This production plays in the round and with a minimum of staging – the fixed portion being a number of vertical white pipes with light wands attached to a maze of pipes above.
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Off the Rails by Randy Reinholz
Oregon Shakespeare Festival Reconfigures Measure for Measure
By: - Aug 06th, 2017This play is both entertaining and rich with messages. It deserves to be seen. At the same time, the playwright tries to accomplish a great deal, perhaps at the expense of cohesion. The tone changes often as dialogue alternates between Shakespearean tracts taken directly from the source and the naturalistic speech of the Old West.
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