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Theater

Courthouse dusts off Nunsense

Old habits
Nuns, the ones dressed to look like they belong to some Antarctic bird-worshiping cult, are still considered cute.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 15, 2012

Brown/Trinity Rep MFA’s revolutionary Tango

Old World order
A totalitarian regime can persist for many reasons: widespread timidity, complacency, political expediency, fear, and so on.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 08, 2012

The mind is the battleground in the Gamm’s 1984

Reality check
"War Is Peace" and "Freedom Is Slavery" were government slogans in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four , his dystopian fever dream.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 02, 2012

2nd Story’s uproarious Sister act

Divine comedy
Pity the poor nun. The hours are terrible, she's the butt of penguin jokes, and most people have gotten their impression of her from old movies.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 02, 2012

Trinity’s Boeing-Boeing

Come fly with me . . . and me and me
Oh, what a tangled web they weave.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | April 24, 2012

Everett whips up a stunning Brain Storm

Sensory overload
Just when you think that the members of Everett's company couldn't possibly come up with anything more jaw-dropping than previous productions, they reach into a vast realm of thoughts, perceptions, delusions, and clarifications on yet another oft-debated topic.

By: JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | April 18, 2012

Joseph and the Dreamcoat at the Courthouse

Redemption songs
Bible stories can be interesting whether you hear them at church or elsewhere.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | April 03, 2012

The play’s the thing in PC’s Poor Murderer

I is another
Political allegories, whether between book covers or on stage, can be swampy complexities because their authors usually want to get into the weeds of specificities.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | April 03, 2012

Mixed Magic’s Moby Dick: Then and Now

A whale of a metaphor
Herman Melville's epic and innovative novel Moby-Dick , the linchpin of 19th- and 20th-century American literature, is quite the ambitious model for imitation.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 27, 2012

More musings on death at Trinity Rep

Alone together
Death can be easiest for the dead themselves, who don't have to deal with the emotional aftermath, after all.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 27, 2012

The Addams Family get altogether ooky at PPAC

A ghoulish love story
Musical comedies can sometimes be cartoonish, but rarely are they drawn from actual cartoons.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 21, 2012

Trinity’s moving Mourners’ Bench

Life after death
You die, you're dead and buried. But if you survive a loved one's death, or anticipate soon having to, you shamble about wounded.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 21, 2012

2nd Story’s riveting August: Osage County

Truth and consequences
Considering that the play begins and ends with depressing quotes by T.S. Eliot, Tracy Letts's August: Osage County is remarkably fun-filled.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 14, 2012

The Gamm’s boom is a matter of life and death

The end (or the beginning?)
If the end of the world were coming, how would you spend the time?

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 14, 2012

Trinity Rep’s dysfunctional Sparrow Grass

Emotional wreckage
In "Three by Three in Rep," Trinity Repertory Company is taking on an especially ambitious project, cycling three world premieres in a demonstration of the juggling act that used to be common in this country and still is in Europe.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 07, 2012

URI’s marvelous take on Tartuffe

Hilarity and hypocrisy
"The more things change, the more they stay the same" — that phrase may not have found widespread popularity until the 19th century, but French playwright and satirist Molière understood it well.

By: JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | February 29, 2012

TRIST’s delightful twist on Twelfth Night

Googling the Bard
From the earliest days of the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theater (TRIST) in the 1970s, its founder and director Bob Colonna has been one of the state's keenest and cleverest interpreters of the Bard.

By: JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | February 29, 2012

Courthouse’s Avenue Q is a monstrous delight

Oh the places you’ll go!
Think twice before you tell anybody to get real. You might create a monster. Or, in the case of Avenue Q , the Sesame Street -on-LSD Broadway musical, a monster hit since 2003.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | February 22, 2012

Trinity’s delicately balanced Merchant of Venice

The light and the dark
The Merchant of Venice gives modern audiences a lot to think and talk about — including, we can forget, a surprising amount of comedy. But the main concern is it being such a head-shaking case study of the era's anti-Semitism.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | February 15, 2012

A supersized Mary Poppins at PPAC

The bitter and the sweet
There's no secret why the hit musical Mary Poppins has filled more than 9 million seats around the world over the last seven years.

By: BILL RODRIGUEZ | February 15, 2012