Jan Nargi - Page 6

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.

CITY OF ANGELS, Larry Gelbart, Cy Coleman, and David Zippel's musical romp through the seedy underworld of Hollywood via film noir, would be nothing without its dazzling dames. The same holds true for the production soon ending its run at Boston's Lyric Stage. Without the humor and heat brought by the wonderful Leigh Barrett and Jennifer Ellis, director Spiro Veloudos' CITY OF ANGELS would be all steak and no sizzle.

Creators of the recent failed Broadway musical BIG FISH are testing the waters of regional theater with a more intimate, scaled back version of their splashy father-son story now premiering at Boston's SpeakEasy Stage through April 11.

It feels like it could have been written yesterday, but THE COLORED MUSEUM, now in a rollicking revival at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, Mass., was actually first produced in 1986. Written by the estimable Broadway playwright and director George C. Wolfe (Jelly's Last Jam, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches) and directed here with great panache by Tony Award winner Billy Porter (Kinky Boots), this scathing "black black comedy" marches through 300 years of African American history by way of 11 funny but also penetrating living vignettes.

The gripping undertow of a turbulent past threatens to drown the three main characters in OCEANSIDE, a searing new play by Nick Gandiello currently in its world premiere at Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell. Taut, terse and unrelenting, the play ebbs and flows with a deceivingly gentle rhythm until a powerful tsunami all but demolishes each character's carefully constructed new life.

New Repertory Theatre in Watertown revisits Yiddish Theatre with Robert Brustein's new Klezmer musical comedy THE KING OF SECOND AVENUE.

Downton Abbey meets Eugene O'Neill in Ronan Noone's new play THE SECOND GIRL, the story of what goes on in the servants' kitchen while O'Neill's fictional Tyrone family suffer through their very long day's journey into night upstairs.

MOTOWN, Berry Gordy's self-aggrandizing tribute to the independent record label that fused gospel, blues, jazz, doo wop and country into a unique and wildly popular Detroit sound, is currently heating things up at the Boston Opera House through February 15.

An epic story is told on an intimate scale in Suzan-Lori Park's splendid mash-up of Civil War slavery and present-day racial strife.

For thirty-something urban professionals grappling with balancing their personal lives with upwardly mobile careers, Ken Urban's A FUTURE PERFECT may feel timely and relevant. But for Boomers and one-time yuppies who are now the sandwich generation juggling the demands of work, college-bound children and aging parents, the play's conflicts may seem a bit worn.