Theatrical Plays

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Cool drink on a hot day

With Table Manners, Gloucester Stage gives Ayckbourn his due
Alan Ayckbourn has been often dismissed as the British Neil Simon. He's also been hailed as a playwright of such acute insight that, if you look beyond the laughs, he deserves to be mentioned in the same critical breath as Harold Pinter.
By ED SIEGEL | July 05, 2010

Brown's theater juggernaut fires up again

Playtime
The Brown/Trinity Repertory Theatre, a summer program that cultivates promising young playwrights, is set to launch this year's slate of three plays on July 7. Expectations are high.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | June 30, 2010

Brown's theater juggernaut fires up again

Smart acting

Lyric's clever cast in Fools
When Neil Simon penned Fools , writes director Celeste Green in the program notes to her Lyric Music Theater production of the 1981 comedy, he was playing to lose: He was hoping not to make us laugh and cry, but to hose his investors and flout his ex-wife, who was promised the profits of his next play.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | June 24, 2010

Ain't that America?

Good ol’ boys and girls in Trailer Park Musical
Armadillo Acres in the Florida of The Great American Trailer Park Musical may not be a place you want to live, what with the thin walls and occasional gunfire, but it could be a fun place to visit. The Center Stage production in West Kingston is giving us plenty of reason to stick around.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | June 16, 2010

It’s good to be king

TRIST takes Henry VIII outdoors
After being out of the local theater scene for a couple of decades, the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theater (TRIST) is back, staging an outdoor production of Henry VIII at the Roger Williams National Memorial Park, on North Main Street in Providence, through June 26.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | June 15, 2010

Play by play: June 4, 2010

Theater listings, week of June 4, 2010
Theater listings, week of June 4, 2010
By JEFFREY GANTZ | June 03, 2010

Night moves

Theater Of Thought’s Killer Joe
Theater of Thought has done it again, this time with dark humor and Texas accents, as it amplifies theatrical reality with a site-specific rendition of Killer Joe .
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 26, 2010

Play by play: May 28, 2010

Theater listings, May 28, 2010
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | May 27, 2010

Glee and sympathy

The Gold Dust Orphans’ The Gulls; Nora’s The Lady with All the Answers
If Ryan Landry gets any more respectable, he’ll be hosting Masterpiece Theatre.
By CAROLYN CLAY | May 18, 2010

Play by Play: May 21, 2010

Theater listings, May 21, 2010
Boston's weekly theater listings
By JEFFREY GANTZ | May 19, 2010

We band of brothers

Young actors bring a Spartan production of Henry V to the Apohadion
This is the first independent production by the group of five friends who met at Boston’s Emerson College, where they helmed incarnations of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet and Sam Shepard’s True West .
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | May 19, 2010

Old haunts

Blithe Spirit at the Lyric; Hot Mikado at New Rep; August: Osage County at the Colonial
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that Blithe Spirit , that cocktail shaker full of dry martini and ectoplasmic mayhem, will amuse. Playwright Noël Coward diagnosed his own gift as a talent to do just that.
By CAROLYN CLAY | May 11, 2010

Hot and bothered

2nd Story’s hilarious Underpants
Shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater and you get one response. Shout “Die Hose!” (women’s undies) in a German theater back in 1911 and you got another kind of uproar.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 12, 2010

Play by play: May 14, 2010

Theater listings, May 14, 2010
Boston's weekly theater listings
By JEFFREY GANTZ | May 17, 2010

Face the nation

SpeakEasy’s The Great American Trailer Park Musical; Zeitgeist’s Farragut North
White-trash collection has seldom been as hilarious as it is in The Great American Trailer Park Musical , which makes its Brahmin-area debut courtesy of SpeakEasy Stage Company.
By CAROLYN CLAY | May 04, 2010

The race is on

Running through Acorn’s 24-Hour Play Festival
Around 7 pm last Saturday at the St. Lawrence, a sealed envelope was sliced open and its contents, handwritten on three slips of paper, were revealed to a full house: “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 05, 2010

Talking ’bout a revolution

The Gamm’s life-affirming Rock ’n’ Roll
It takes a theatrical genius like Tom Stoppard to come up with Rock ’n’ Roll, which merges the pulsing spirit of both until they feel like one. And it takes a theater of the caliber of the Gamm to make history feel like a Stones concert that becomes a political rally.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 05, 2010

Transformations

Young Frankenstein at the Opera House; The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead in Lowell
As fans of the film are aware, that precipitous crag atop which the castle of Young Frankenstein sits is a Catskill. But in The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein (at the Opera House through May 2), the mountain is shrouded less in 1930s-horror-movie gloom than in Vegas glitz.
By CAROLYN CLAY | April 27, 2010

Learning to live

URI Theatre’s sprawling Unbound
Fanny Kemble is known for being a celebrated British actress in her early 19th-century youth and again toward middle age.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | April 27, 2010

When traders equal traitors

Turncoats on Wall Street. Plus, ecori, celebrating Susan, and Rock ’n’ Roll
It is about time someone pointed out that the vile crooks of Wall Street aren’t just greedy, thieving bastards. They are, in fact, traitors to this country and its citizens.
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | April 28, 2010

Review: Death at a Funeral

Farce in the age of Obama
Once the enfant terrible of misogynistic movies (see 1997’s In the Company of Men ), Neil LaBute has moved on to remakes. His take on a 1973 horror classic ( The Wicker Man ) is either classically horrible or classically brilliant.
By BRETT MICHEL | April 21, 2010

Dynamic duo

Trinity Rep’s over-the-top The Odd Couple
There are King Oedipus and his mom, there are Romeo and Juliet, and there are Oscar and Felix.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | April 21, 2010

New voices

Acorn’s latest Maine Playwrights Festival
For nearly a decade now, Maine playwrights have had a fine friend and benefactor in Acorn Productions.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 21, 2010

Review: Tír Na Theatre Company's Trad

Trad delivers a kiss and a kick to Irish drama
The fiddler’s on the ground floor in Trad , but Tevye would nonetheless identify with the play’s history-bound patriarch — though compared with this venerable coot, Sholem Aleichem’s beleaguered dairyman is a spring chicken.
By CAROLYN CLAY | April 13, 2010