Trinity Repertory Company

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Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium’s Parade

An unfortunate man
Parade might be the best musical, as well as the most unlikely one, that you've never seen. Its one-line plot description isn't exactly alluring.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | December 07, 2011

Trinity’s compelling Christmas Carol

Comfort and joy
The more things stay the same, the more they change. At least that's the way they've been having it with Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol at Trinity Repertory Company for 35 years.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | November 30, 2011

Trinity Rep’s rip-roaring His Girl Friday

The write stuff
There are theatrical adaptations and then there are magnificent transformations, like His Girl Friday . Multiple-Obie Award-winning playwright John Guare has expanded the furious screwball comedy into a historical/social commentary without our losing out on the knee-slapping.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 21, 2011

Emotions run high at the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep

Love and misery
Summer brings the annual trio of productions by Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep. Love is the common theme of this year's plays — love and its soulmate misery, it goes without saying.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | July 26, 2011

Review: Perishable's Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Lust for life
If Alexander Platt's take on Hedwig and the Angry Inch were packed with any more energy, the bomb squad would have to be called out every night.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | June 28, 2011

Review: Arlene Violet's The Family

Wiseguys (and dolls)
If anybody not under potential indictment is qualified to write something titled The Family , subtitled "A Musical About the Mob," it's Arlene Violet.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | June 10, 2011

Review: Poe vs. Poe in Trinity's Strange Tale

I Is Another
What's left to spook us these days? Crime shows display forensic detail that has inured us to blood.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 18, 2011

Review: Threepenny Opera is dark and dynamic

A really big show
No wonder, theatrically speaking, that The Threepenny Opera takes three hours to perform.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 17, 2011

Review: Trinity's Steel Magnolias is fun and poignant

Both sides now
The first thing you need to know is that over the course of watching Steel Magnolias , which is getting a no-laffs-barred production by Trinity Repertory Company (through May 15), all my testosterone drained out and pooled at my feet.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | April 27, 2011

Review: Trinity's Yellowman gets beneath the surface

Pride and prejudice
With its usual acting prowess, distilled into two characters, Trinity Repertory Company is presenting an affecting drama about black-on-black prejudice, Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman .
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 08, 2011

Review: Trinity Rep’s Crucible is potent

Hidden agendas
The Crucible is a profoundly moving story, especially when inhabited by the talents at Trinity Repertory Company. This is the third time the group has taken on Arthur Miller's masterwork of American theater, the last a quarter-century ago.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | February 17, 2011

Preview: Trinity Rep takes The Crucible to the streets

Truth and consequences
Arthur Miller's The Crucible was a seminal work of American theater, taking a shameful passage of history — the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century — and melding it in the audience's consciousness with a contemporary parallel — the Red Scare hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which prompted a Hollywood blacklist of suspects.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | February 02, 2011

Review: The Gamm's masterful Doll's House

A matter of trust
There have been other plays well worth seeing this season, but nothing like this masterpiece at the Gamm. And I don't mainly mean the classic by Henrik Ibsen itself, since A Doll's House in shaky hands can come across as shrill and lesson-laden.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | January 26, 2011

Winter theatre preview: From the Bard to Becky Shaw

Gionfriddo, Synge, Ibsen, and more
From the latest Pulitzer winner for drama to a musical adaptation of a popular board game, and from the Bard to Becky Shaw, Rhode Island theaters are certainly starting 2011 with varied offerings.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | December 29, 2010

Theatre that ran the emotional gamut in 2010

The human condition
We laugh, we cry, we stifle annoyance and look at our watches. Theater performances vary widely in what they attempt and how well they accomplish it.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | December 22, 2010

Trinity Rep's uplifting It's A Wonderful Life

The road taken
Who says you can't have it both ways? Trinity Repertory Company is presenting the sentimental movie classic It's a Wonderful Life as "A Live Radio Play" (through January 2) and they've managed to make it an absorbing — and theatrical — experience.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | December 15, 2010

Review: Tennessee Williams's self-indulgent Vieux Carré

Only the lonely
Tennessee Williams scholars and melodrama buffs will be quick-marching over to the Brown/Trinity Rep performance of his early Vieux Carré (at the Pell Chafee Performance Center through December 19).
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | December 15, 2010

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Review: Trinity Rep gets to the Heart of Scrooge

The inner Ebenezer
The more things stay the same, the more they change; at least that's so regarding Trinity Repertory Company's A Christmas Carol (through December 31). Every year on Washington Street, they task themselves with resurrecting the Charles Dickens tale by breathing new life into it.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | December 01, 2010

Preview: Trinity charts Ebenezer's emotional journey

The Tao of Scrooge
There are more than 30 different productions of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol being performed at hundreds of theaters around the country, usually in clone versions as identical as re-screened films. Familiarity breeds big box office.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | November 30, 2010

Trinity's rollicking Absurd Person Singular

All about Eves
Very strange. It's as though British playwright Alan Ayckbourn had come to Trinity Rep, studied its veteran acting company, laughed heartily at the amusing talent on display, then went home and wrote Absurd Person Singular for six of the actors.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 27, 2010

Trinity's Absurd Person Singular

Trinity nails down Alan Ayckbourn
As playwriting goes, there's prolific and then there's prolific. There's, say, Shakespeare with his piddling 38 plays. And then there's someone like Alan Ayckbourn: 73 full-length babies, and counting.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 14, 2010

Review: Trinity Rep's magical Camelot

An enchanted evening
Camelot is a hard musical not to like, even for those who don’t like to like musicals.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 22, 2010

Review: Trinity Rep revisits Camelot

A royal revival
Ask the historians, the psychologists, the sociologists. The more a society is troubled, the more it harkens back to a Golden Age — such as the one depicted in Camelot , the Lerner and Loewe musical that Trinity Repertory Company is staging through October 10.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 14, 2010

Fall Theater Preview: Musicals and more

Belting it out and acting up
If we've come to know anything about 2nd Story Theatre, it's that we shouldn't presume to know what plays to expect.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 14, 2010

Taste of the town

A guide to Savor Providence
The third annual Savor Providence event, a benefit for Trinity Rep, will take place on Saturday, August 28 from 11 am to 3 pm, as foodies choose 10 restaurants to visit (a book of 10 "tastes" is $35).
By JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | August 26, 2010

Spider man

Richard III weaves his web in Lenox
Dreams and portents loom large in Richard III . So it seems fitting that John Douglas Thompson's dynamic Dick Crookback should deliver the play's famed opening lines from a supine position on the floor, as if envisaging in slumber "the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York."
By CAROLYN CLAY | August 15, 2010

With plans for a downtown mural, Shepard Fairey returns to Providence

Obey
It is a rather unremarkable collection of bricks at the moment: an exterior wall at the back of Trinity Repertory Company’s Pell Chafee Performance Center in downtown Providence.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | June 16, 2010

Masterful metaphor

Trinity Rep’s enthralling Syringa Tree
Some individual experiences certainly can scale up.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 12, 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