Jan Nargi - Page 3

Jeffrey Hatcher's stage adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A CONFERERACY OF DUNCES, now in its world premiere at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, feels like a lost opportunity. Much like its obnoxious and oversized central character Ignatius J. Reilly, a slovenly, unemployed 30-year-old still living with and supported by his sweetly doting mother, the play is a lumbering behemoth that is often equal parts boring and boorish.

Even though Whoopi Goldberg was the lead producer of SISTER ACT on Broadway, the "Divine Musical" raising the roof at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Mass. is not the SISTER ACT of Whoopi Goldberg's 1992 hit movie. Yes, the sassy attitude and jubilant spirit of the nightclub singer taking involuntary refuge in a cloistered convent are still intact, but the revised book by Cheri and Bill Steinkellner and original score by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater make this jaunty screen-to-stage adaptation an all new joy to behold.

This Fall two of Boston's finest theater companies have taken the discussion on abortion out of the public arena and made it much more personal. Last month Company One Theatre explored the devastating reality of do-it-yourself abortions among teenagers in Ruby Rae Spiegel's unflinching new play DRY LAND. Now the Tony Award-winning Huntington Theatre Company examines the lingering, long-range effects of abortion in CHOICE, a provocative new play by Winnie Holzman (Wicked, My So-Called Life) that has a woman caught in the throes of a mid-life crisis looking back on the choice she made in her feminist youth.

Unwanted pregnancy and terminal illness haunt the flinty girls at the center of two gritty new plays by playwrights Ruby Rae Spiegel and Lauren Gunderson now receiving their New England premieres at Company One in Boston and Merrimack Rep in Lowell.

One man, two chairs, six guitars and 15 songs mark the road from loss to redemption for singer-songwriter Benjamin Scheuer in his haunting autobiographical solo musical THE LION launching its national tour at Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Mass.

WAITRESS, the promising new musical adaptation of the 2007 indie rom-com that starred Kerri Russell and Nathan Fillion, may need a bit more shaking and baking before it's ready to contend for Broadway's Blue Ribbon. However, singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, screenwriter-turned-librettist Jessie Nelson, director Diane Paulus and star Jessie Mueller have stirred enough tasty ingredients into their bittersweet concoction to whet the audience's appetite for a second serving.

The sex may be in the heels, but in KINKY BOOTS the fun is in Cyndi Lauper's Tony and Grammy Award-winning score, a bouncy pop techno-disco party which keeps the musical's pedestrian plot from (ahem) dragging the show down.

There's no mistaking who's in charge in the Williamstown Theatre Festival's crackling production of A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN now running through August 23. As Eugene O'Neill's indomitable Josie Hogan, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald stomps, kicks, shoves and brandishes a big stick as she asserts her dominance over her father Phil (Glynn Turman), her landlord and wannabe love interest James Tyrone (Will Swenson), and anyone else who gets in her way.

You won't be slipped a Mickey Finn, but Maine's Ogunquit Playhouse will knock you off your feet with its 'delishious' production of NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT running through August 15. Chock-a-block full of bootleggers, playboys, dancing girls and temperance leaders, NICE WORK is a non-stop musical feast with non-stop screwball laughs.

Stage, film and television star Jennifer Coolidge ends her acclaimed run in SAVING KITTY at the Nora Theatre Company in Cambridge, Mass., on Sunday, August 2. Coolidge stars as the devastatingly funny Kate Hartley, a smart but frustrated society matron who is bound and determined to save her daughter Kitty from the kind of stifling marriage she has had.

Berkshire Theatre Group's revival of BELLS ARE RINGING starring Broadway's charming husband and wife duo Graham Rowat and Kate Baldwin can be described in two words: sensory overload. Director Ethan Heard and his entire creative team have worked the 1956 kitsch so hard that the physical elements overwhelm the performances - and challenge the actors to ratchet things up to a fever pitch just to be noticed.

Small-town life is anything but a picnic in William Inge's newly discovered, previously unproduced play OFF THE MAIN ROAD currently receiving its decades-delayed world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshires. This dense and diffuse melodrama meanders through a forest of darkness and despair only to return its three generations of hapless women back to the starting point with little to show for their travels.

VICTOR/VICTORIA's gender-bending exploration of sexual identity and orientation may have seemed fresh, even daring, in 1982, but by the time it hit Broadway in 1995 it was already a bit tame. Today in a 20th anniversary production at Maine's Ogunquit Playhouse, it feels downright quaint when compared to the courage of Caitlyn Jenner and the recent Supreme Court ruling finally making Marriage Equality the law of the land.

In THOREAU, a world premiere play written by and starring Berkshire Theatre Group's David Adkins, the renowned author, philosopher and activist returns to Walden in search of peace but can't escape his own inner anguish over the horrors of slavery and the execution of abolitionist John Brown.

A lot may seem familiar in Disney's Broadway musical NEWSIES now on tour in Boston, but the dancing chorus of a dozen or so able-bodied newsboys makes this production soar.

Three abandoned but not lost souls find strength in each other in A. Rey Pamatmat's quirky but penetrating comedy EDITH CAN SHOOT THINGS AND HIT THEM at Company One in Boston.

Director Nick Kenkel has made lightning strike a second time at North Shore Music Theatre with his dazzling and definitive production of DREAMGIRLS. Blessed with a dream design team and a tremendously talented cast of triple threats, Kenkel has dug beneath the glitz and the glamour of the American music industry to explore the hopes, joys, disappointments and sorrows that accompany stars on the way up and back down.

Boston theatrical royalty brightens Lyric Stage Company's LIGHT UP THE SKY, Moss Hart's classic comic valentine to the divos and divas of the stage.

In the famous 1960s hit 'Is That All There Is?' by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Peggy Lee croons the melancholy lyric, 'If that's all there is, my friend, then, let's keep dancing. Let's break out the booze and have a ball, if that's all there is.' While this song ironically doesn't make it into the eclectic catalog of tunes that fuel THE LAST TWO PEOPLE ON EARTH: AN APOCALYPTIC VAUDEVILLE, currently in its world premiere at the A.R.T. in Cambridge, it could easily have become the show's theme song. When a flood of epic proportions wipes out all but two scraggly survivors, played as a pair of Estragon and Vladimir-style hobos by Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac, there is very little left for them to do but sing and dance.

In his new dark comedy SCENES FROM AN ADULTERY, now enjoying its world premiere at the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Mass. through May 17, Irish American playwright Ronan Noone has taken the national pastime of gossip and turned it on its ear.