R. Scott Reedy - Page 9

Kristine Nielsen has made her name on Broadway playing roles in all kinds of comedies and dramas, but only a very few musicals. She’s changing that up this season, however, portraying Susan Proctor, an Actors’ Studio teacher and confidante to Ivy Lynn, a Broadway star preparing to play Marilyn Monroe, in the new musical comedy “Smash,” at New York’s Imperial Theatre.

Over 50 years since its original Broadway production had its out-of-town tryout at Boston’s Shubert Theatre, the Stephen Sondheim musical Company, with book by George Furth, has had three revivals.

Indeed, when those one-liners and puns are not only corny but all about corn, you just may want to surrender and let the laughs burst like Jiffy Pop, as they are on the North American tour of “Shucked,” the musical being presented by Broadway in Boston at Citizens Opera House now through April 20.

In “Sojourners,” the first play in the nine-part Ufot Family Cycle by first-generation Nigerian American playwright Mfoniso Udofia – presented last fall by the Huntington – Boston audiences met Abasiama, a hardworking Nigerian living in Houston, Texas, in 1978 and working toward a degree in biology.

What did our critic think of NIGHT SIDE SONGS at American Repertory Theater?

The legend of Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre stems in part from the many pre-Broadway tryouts that have and continue to take place there, including not one but two now-iconic Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musicals, 1943’s “Oklahoma!” – when it was still being called “Away We Go!” – and 1945’s “Carousel.”

What did our critic think of THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG at Greater Boston Stage Company?

Written by and starring comedic actor and playwright Wallace Shawn and avant garde theater director André Gregory, and based on their lives, the 1981 film is the story of two old friends who share dinner at a New York bistro while revisiting their ongoing debate about the life of an artist and the art of making a living.

In playwright Ricardo Pérez González’s “Don’t Eat the Mangos,” three Puerto Rican sisters are living outside San Juan as a hurricane approaches and family tumult causes secrets and ugly truths to spill out.

The first production of Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux’s “The Triumph of Love” – performed in Paris in 1732 – was no box-office bonanza. Indeed, it closed after just six performances, with audiences apparently finding distasteful the story of a princess seducing not only a young man but an older man and an older woman as well.

Anyone familiar with the mysterious and spooky, not to mention altogether ooky, Addams Family will tell you that Morticia and Gomez’s daughter Wednesday is known not only for her morbid nature, but also for her ever-present and carefully protected pigtails.

What did our critic think of PARADE at Emerson Colonial Theatre?

Waltham native Krystal Hernandez made her Broadway debut on February 19, taking over the coveted role of Anna of Cleves, one of the wives of Henry VIII, in the New York production of the Tony Award-winning musical comedy “SIX,” now at the Lena Horne Theatre.

What did our critic think of A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE at Roberts Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion At Boston Center For The Arts?

Growing up outside Chicago, Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Sarah Ruhl (“The Clean House,” “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)”) would listen to a cassette of Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on holiday drives with her family to her father’s home state of Iowa.

What did our critic think of LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR AND GRILL at Merrimack Repertory Theatre?

With its magnificent mounting of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” at Hibernian Hall in Nubian Square, Roxbury, through February 23, Actors’ Shakespeare Project has given Boston theatergoers the first must-see production of 2025.