Nancy Grossman - Page 20

Boston Playwrights' Theatre opens its 36th season with Cliff Odle's ode to jazz and its place in the transitional period of the late 1950s to early 1960s. Director Diego Arciniegas does a first-rate job of translating Odle's play with music into a living, breathing entity with a rhythmic ebb and flow. An ensemble of seven actors and three live musicians give the play a real-life, real time quality that makes us feel like we are in Mitzy's Jazz Kitchen in Harlem in 1959.

In his touring show which stopped in at Sanders Theatre on Friday evening, Alan Cumming displays an eclectic array of entertaining abilities, including singing, movement, and story-telling, and proves to be a loquacious bon vivant. His personalized renditions of pop songs were accompanied by Music Director/pianist Lance Horne, cellist Eleanor Norton, and drummer Darcy Macrae.

Flat Earth Theatre open its 12th season with Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner's 1987 play, a juxtaposition of the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany with the Reagan administration's neglect of the AIDS crisis in America. In 2017, there are lessons to heed from these watershed moments.

The world premiere production of WARHOLCAPOTE: A Non-Fiction Invention at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge exposes us to never-before-heard conversations between these two icons, brought vividly to life by Stephen Spinella and Dan Butler. Adaptor Rob Roth used their own words to enlighten us about their connection and outline their commonalities.

Zeitgeist Stage Company begins its 17th season with the East Coast premiere of Selina Fillinger's FACELESS, a play with a storyline that sits smack in the middle of the national zeitgeist. It pits a sheltered 18-year old white girl against a Harvard Law School graduate and practicing Muslim in a taut courtroom drama that is about much more than the charges being litigated. Terrorism and ISIS are on trial, but the face of a young American woman is symbolic of how the enemy is expanding its reach into our homeland via social media, and the attorney in the hijab is the unlikely government crusader chosen to fight back.

Actors' Shakespeare Project opens its 14th season, The Downfall of Despots, with a comedy about a narcissistic despot who is having difficulty accepting his mortality. Director Dmitry Troyanovsky has the good fortune to work with a stellar ensemble, lead by the inimitable Richard Snee, and Sarah Newhouse and Jesse Hinson as his two dissimilar wives. Rounding out the cast are Dayenne Walters, Rachel Belleman, and Gunnar Manchester.

Merrimack Repertory Theatre rings the bell for the start of its 39th season with the New England premiere of Marco Ramirez's award-winning play inspired by the life of Jack Johnson, the first black man to fight for the title of World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. THE ROYALE is a beautifully-written and acted story about a man's quest to get his due and make a difference, about the unforeseen consequences of his actions and the damage he leaves in his wake, and a stunning commentary on the rending of the American social fabric that continues to threaten our peace and tranquility.

SpeakEasy Stage Company opens its 27th season with the Boston-area premiere of MEN ON BOATS, directed by Dawn Simmons, and featuring an all-female design team and a racially diverse, non-male cast. The playwright specifies in the script that the actors are to be female-identifying, trans-identifying, gender fluid, and/or non-gender-conforming, but no cisgender white males. Even as she bases the play on the known history and Major John Wesley Powell's own journal of the events on his 1869 expedition, Jaclyn Backhaus flips the narrative by altering the nature of the cast of characters.

Gloucester Stage Company presents the world premiere of playwright Jim Frangione's FLIGHT OF THE MONARCH following an overwhelming audience response to a reading last fall. Managing Director Jeff Zinn is at the controls, with a fine pair of collaborators in Nancy E. Carroll and J. Tucker Smith as a pair of middle-aged siblings who rely on each other as ports in the storm of life.

DAMES AT SEA is a welcome escape from the upheaval of the moment, if only for a couple of hours. The six-member cast shines with an abundance of smiles, vocal belts, and tap routines that they make look easy. Ephie Aardema, who has previously made a few splashes on this stage (HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS, THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE, 42ND STREET), is back after a stint on Broadway to play Ruby, that starstruck girl based on the lead character in 42ND STREET. Wearing both the director's hat and the choreographer's character shoes, Associate Artistic Director Ilyse Robbins puts her traditional feel-good imprint on the show. Book your passage now!

New Repertory Theatre opens its season with IDEATION, the Boston-area premiere of Aaron Loeb's play that is equally thrilling and disturbing as we try to adapt to the rapidly changing normal in America. With an unpredictable neophyte at the helm of our ship of state, a legislative body in a perilous state of gridlock, and the 24-hour news cycle constantly bombarding us with information, our ability to separate fact from fallacy, as well as our resilience, is being tested. Loeb's characters find themselves in a high-stakes situation that may or may not be a test, and their capacity to work together is threatened by creeping doubt and mistrust.

The Lyric Stage Company of Boston has hit the trifecta with their season opener GYPSY, directed and choreographed by Rachel Bertone, music directed by Dan Rodriguez, and raised to the rafters by Leigh Barrett's forceful Mama Rose. This is one for the ages.

Founding Artistic Director of Gloucester Stage Company returns to direct the New England premiere of his latest comedy, OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES. Paula Plum, Sarah Hickler, Obehi Janice, and Debra Wise play four diverse women who meet in a spacious Paris apartment to remember and memorialize the recently departed 100-year old man who had lived there and loved them all during the last half century.

FINDING NEVERLAND was born across the river in Cambridge at the American Repertory Theater three years ago, but has settled in for a fortnight in the downtown Boston Theater district. Under the direction of Diane Paulus, with choreography by Mia Michaels, the original design team remains intact, and an all-new cast brings the familiar characters to life. Broadway veterans Billy Harrigan Tighe, Lynnfield native Christine Dwyer, and John Davidson headline the multi-talented ensemble.

In a bizarre and unfortunate case of life imitating art, Reagle Music Theatre of Greater Boston found itself without its leading man only hours before the curtain going up on their season-ending production of 42nd STREET. Producing Artistic Director Robert J. Eagle announced that the understudy would step into the role and the show opened as scheduled. Rich Allegretto, headliner Rachel York, and the stellar company pulled it together to remind everyone what theater is all about.

Randy Rainbow kicked off his first New England tour in Boston last night with two shows at the Roberts Studio Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts. On his maiden trip to the Hub, Rainbow was greeted with a rousing ovation by a decidedly liberal audience primed to yuck it up at the expense of the 45th POTUS. The self-described internet sensation, famous for his viral satiric videos, lightly sang and quipped his way through a breezy hour-long first set, and graciously paused for a meet-and-greet with select guests between shows.

BULLETS OVER BROADWAY brings Woody Allen's New Yorker sensibility to the seaside community of Ogunquit, Maine, along with a coterie of thugs, hoofers, show people, and one adorable pug. Based on Allen's and co-writer Douglas McGrath's 1994 film of the same name, the musical incorporates old songs from the 1920s to ground the madcap action in the era of prohibition, when bathtub gin and gangsters with pistols and fedoras were equally prevalent. Jeff Whiting recreates Susan Stroman's original direction and outstanding choreography, and the amazing ensemble dancers tilt and whirl with foot-stomping abandon that resonates through the Ogunquit Playhouse.

It is a simple premise: Two candidates in a pharmaceutical drug trial fall in love, but is their chemistry real, or induced? This scientific debate is the subject of Lucy Prebble's THE EFFECT, now in its New England Premiere at Gloucester Stage Company. Under the direction of Sam Weisman, the play stars Lindsay Crouse as Dr. Lorna James and Brad Hall as Dr. Toby Sealey, a pair with a past, along with Susannah Hoffman and Mickey Solis as the volunteers who may have a future. Both relationships contribute talking points on either side of the discourse that fuels the drama, but the playwright leaves enough doubt to allow the viewer to wrestle with the conclusion.

Laughs in abundance are in free fall in the Huntington Theatre Company's production of Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire's RIPCORD, a bejeweled vehicle for a pair of women of a certain age that is polished to a shine by the brilliant performances of Nancy E. Carroll and Annie Golden. Under the brisk, breezy direction of Jessica Stone (VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE), these two pros turn life in an assisted living facility into Abby and Marilyn's excellent adventure. As roommates who are anything but soulmates, they engage in a protracted battle of wits to win a bet for supremacy over their little corner of a shrinking world, and the only rule is to take no prisoners.

The Nora Theatre Company presents the world premiere of Alan Brody's THE MIDVALE HIGH SCHOOL FIFTIETH REUNION, a light-hearted, evocative trip down Memory Lane with the Class of 1954. Directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner, Emmy-winning actor Gordon Clapp and Underground Railway Theater Artistic Director Debra Wise portray two classmates returning to their alma mater for the first time. Neither is sure of what they're looking for, but they hope they'll recognize it if they find it.