R. Scott Reedy - Page 5

Arlekin Players Theatre’s production of “Our Class” led the winners at this year’s Lucille Lortel Awards, presented at New York University on May 4, where the play, by Tadeusz Słobodzianek and adapted by Norman Allen, was honored as Best Revival.

Orville Peck didn’t put his feet up on a recent night off from “Cabaret” – instead he planted them firmly onstage with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall, to headline the orchestra’s second annual Pride Night.

The fragrant aroma wafting through Greater Boston Stage Company these days isn’t only the scent of the nearby florist, it’s also the sweet smell of the success that the Stoneham company is having with its wondrously well done production of “Little Shop of Horrors.”

After its sold-out world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in 2015, a four-year Broadway run, and a national tour that played Boston’s Citizens Opera House in 2018, the Tony and Grammy Award-nominated musical “Waitress” is open for business in a marvelously entertaining new production at Bill Hanney’s North Shore Music Theatre through June 15.

Talent and versatility are just two of the reasons that Maureen Keiller is one of greater Boston’s busiest performers.

The term “rom com” has often been used to describe the musical “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).” And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, unless it means a steady diet of only Hallmark and Lifetime movies, it’s also a bit like comparing supermarket cake with one fresh from a bakery.

History is being made on Broadway this season, with seven performers of Filipino descent simultaneously bringing luster to the stage and ticket buyers to the box office.

Kathy St. George – who will receive the Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence from the Boston Theater Critics Association at the 42nd annual Elliot Norton Awards on June 2 at the Huntington Theatre – is that rare breed, a show business quadruple threat.

Classic American theater composers like Leonard Bernstein, John Kander, and Stephen Sondheim have been good to Aimee Doherty – giving her a wide range of characters to play and songs to sing. She has returned the favor by giving standout performances in their musicals that have made her one of the leading lights on greater Boston’s stages.

When it comes to “Star Trek,” George Takei has been there from the beginning, when the now iconic “Theme from Star Trek,” by composer Alexander Courage, first invited television viewers to go “where no man has gone before.”

The 1962 feature film “Light in the Piazza” was shot on location at the Piazza della Signoria and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Via Veneto and Roma Ostiense railway station in Rome, making its technicolor splendor a hard act to follow when the story, based on a 1960 novella by Elizabeth Spencer, was developed for the stage in 2003.

And if you’re too busy to take your pencils back to school, and maybe not the biggest stickler for accuracy, then you may want to head to Stoneham for “Founding F%!#ers: The Story of Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold,” a play by Conor Casey being given its world premiere at Greater Boston Stage Company through May 18.

Conductor Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops set the mood for the recent Opening Night at Pops, featuring the luminous Cynthia Erivo, with a rhythmic “The Club” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” and the rousing “Gotta Dance” medley from “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.”

And when it comes to the humble Harlem hair salon in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, now in its New England premiere at SpeakEasy Stage in the Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, through May 31, make that something to marvel at.

The musical “The Spitfire Grill” – with book and music by James Valcq and lyrics by the late Fred Alley, who also co-wrote the book – perfectly captures the small-town ethos of its rural Gilead, Wisconsin, setting.

In the summer of 1975, moviegoers flocked to theaters to see “Jaws,” the story of the hunt for a man-eating great white shark attacking beachgoers at a summer vacation spot, making the picture the first summer blockbuster.

The Boston Pops will once again turn to the music and stars of Broadway when the orchestra opens its 139th spring season at  Symphony Hall on May 8 with Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award-winner Cynthia Erivo (“The Color Purple”) as special guest.