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Dressed to Kill

by James Yeara February 16, 2012

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Wit’s not the thing you need around the house, And it’s no joy to have a bookish spouse. When I get married, you can bet your life My man will study nothing but his wife --Martine, Act 5, scene ...

0 comments Shakespeare & Company Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre
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A Real Pisser

by John Rodat February 9, 2012

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  The musical Urinetown is a curious blend of earnest social commentary and ironic self-awareness. On the one hand, it scolds (if it doesn’t quite skewer) capitalistic-monopolistic command over essential resources; on the other, it satirizes ...

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Lovable

by James Yeara February 1, 2012

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Rich in theatrical allusions and as pregnant with satire and humor as a Chekhov or a Shaw play, Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig ripples with laughter as it pricks the soul. This 1992 follow up ...

0 comments Capital Repertory Theatre
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A Little Ooky

by Shawn Stone December 1, 2011

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You can’t kill cartoonist Charles Addams’ bizarre characters. You can bend them and twist them for various media, but their inner nature shines through. In its finest moments, the newish musical version of The Addams Family, ...

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Better for This

by Kathryn Geurin November 22, 2011

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Man of La Mancha, the Tony Award-winning musical classic of Impossible Dreams currently on stage at Capital Repertory Theater, finds author-actor-tax-collector Miguel Cervantes and his manservant tossed in a dungeon by the Spanish Inquisition for ...

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We Interrupt This Broadcast

by B.A. Nilsson October 13, 2011

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The infamous 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds exists in at least two versions. There’s the broadcast itself, which took place at particular time when politics and technology combined to explode what ...

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Original Glazed

by James Yeara September 29, 2011

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The opening of Capital Repertory Theatre’s Superior Donuts is the perfect metaphor for the state America is in today. The production begins in the rundown interior of missing owner Arthur Przybyszewski’s (George Tynan Crowley) 60-year-old ...

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Spark and Sputter

by James Yeara September 14, 2011

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The 21 scenes in Ismail Khalidi’s Tennis in Nablus show off Stageworks/Hudson at its best and worst. A new play having its East Coast premiere, Tennis in Nablus centers on Palestine, spring 1939. In some ...

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Fearless

by B.A. Nilsson August 31, 2011

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A friend who works for the state described the office scene last Friday: an exodus of fellow workers fleeing to sandbag their homes in advance of Irene. Friday night I attended this Oldcastle Theatre production ...

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Out of Time

by James Yeara August 24, 2011

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The leisure-class clash in Autres Temps, the Wharton Salon’s third annual production at the Mount, has been given an effectively timely update. First published in Century magazine exactly 100 years ago this August, Edith Wharton’s ...

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Sister Act

by The Staff August 24, 2011

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If you take reasonably good care of yourself and avoid safes falling from the sky, you’ll win the consolation prize of becoming an orphan. It’s too late to settle your parental issues, but the ghost ...

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Summer Lovin’

by John Rodat August 11, 2011

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The musical Grease was, in its original inception, a gritty drama about working-class teens in 1950s Chicago. But, according to playwright Jim Jacobs, he was told that for the play to be successful he needed ...

0 comments Mac-Haydn Theatre
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Beauty Versus the Biz

by James Yeara August 11, 2011

For its innaugural production, Berkshire Actors Theatre presents a stiletto interpretation of John Patrick Shanley’s 1993 smackdown of moviemaking, Four Dogs and a Bone. An Academy Award winner for Moonstruck and a Pulitzer Prize winner ...

0 comments New Stage Performing Center
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Keeping It Real

by Kathryn Geurin July 28, 2011

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The first person ever to conduct Internet securities fraud—manipulating Wall Street from a dial-up connection in his New Jersey home—was 15 years old. This tidbit may not sound like prime musical-theater fodder. But writer-composer team ...

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Strangers With Cheeseballs

by John Rodat July 28, 2011

I was unaware that sibling entertainers Amy and David Sedaris had written a play together until I saw the billing for the New Stage Performing Arts Center’s production of The Book of Liz. (I have ...

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Broadway Gold

by James Yeara July 28, 2011

Mel Brooks’ satirical Broadway smash The Producers is unquestionably comic gold. The 2001 musical won a record 12 Tony Awards that year then ran for six years and some 2,500 performances on Broadway, spawning subsequent ...

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Hallelujah, Baby

by B.A. Nilsson July 20, 2011

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With all eight pieces of the band wailing as Leslie Uggams gives a powerhouse treatment to “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” you can’t help but be impressed the energy. It’s a great sound, ...

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Time it Was

by Ralph Hammann July 14, 2011

I’d wondered if Michael Weller’s classic, which is set in the school year of 1965-66 and concerns a group of college roommates about to graduate, would come across today as a dated curiosity or a ...

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Long Live Rock

by John Rodat July 14, 2011

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  Originally a double album of conceptually linked songs released by the Who in 1969, Tommy was the first music to be popularly designated a “rock opera.” Though some work in that vein had been done ...

0 comments Colonial Theatre
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Cabin Pressure

by John Rodat July 6, 2011

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In 1991, Marc Camoletti's Boeing-Boeing was entered into the Guinness Book of Records as the most-performed French play in the world—30 years after its debut. To gain such recognition over such countrymen as Voltaire, Molière, ...

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Playfull Potpourri

by James Yeara July 6, 2011

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At the beginning of the one-act that closes the first set of the Play by Play festival, graduate student Ethan (Timothy W. Hull) stands downstage, eagerly enunciating every syllable. His eyes and vowels seem to ...

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I Like It

by B.A. Nilsson July 6, 2011

A small banjolele emerges from the upstage curtain of the thrust stage, and the player gives the opening chords to “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.” The curtain parts ...

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Redemption Song

by Ralph Hammann July 6, 2011

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In her first season as the WTF’s artistic director, Jenny Gersten is defining herself as a risk taker who is willing to mount plays of conscience and depth. Three Hotels hardly promises the commercial success ...

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Myth Adventures

by John Rodat June 29, 2011

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In K of D, an Urban Legend, an unnamed narrator (“the girl, who does most of the talking” in the script) begins by telling the audience that the story she’s going ...

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Train to Nowhere

by James Yeara June 29, 2011

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Director David Cromer is a certified genius. Even without his 2010 MacArthur “genius” grant, the mark of Cromer’s genius blazed in the excellence of his Our Town, which ran for 18 ...

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