BOSTON INTERVIEWS

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....

Stage star Carolee Carmello has played a wide range of roles in her career – from “Cordelia, the kosher caterer,” in the original Broadway production of “Falsettos,” Lucille Frank in the Broadway premiere of “Parade,” Donna Sheridan in “Mamma Mia!” Dolly Gallagher Levi in “Hello,...

Few cultural icons have held the public’s attention for as long as the one and only Betty Boop. And now, the wide-eyed vixen has branched out from animated films and television to live-action Broadway in BOOP! The Musical....

And the Plastics of North Shore High School – the self-obsessed, their-way-or-the-highway trio of “mean girls” at the center of the eponymous hit 2004 feature-film comedy, the 2018 Broadway musical it inspired, and the 2024 feature film based on the musical  – have done just that, becoming ...

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 M...

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 W...

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....

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....

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....

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....

Writer and director Gerard Alessandrini, the comedy mastermind behind “Forbidden Broadway,” has long taken his own Broadway fandom one step further, though, creating iconic parodies of stars like Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Carol Channing, Liza Minnelli, Yul Brynner, Patti LuPone, Chita Rivera, M...

Actor, playwright, producer, and director Jordan E. Cooper is on a roll. The Emmy-nominated television sitcom “The Ms. Pat Show,” which he created, co-executive produces and directs, premiered on BET+ in 2021 and is now in its fifth season on the streaming service....

Having landed more than a dozen hits – “Midnight Blue,” “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” “You Should Hear How She Talks About You,” and “Through the Eyes of Love” among them – on the Billboard charts in her long recording career, Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Melissa Manchester k...

Goerke will be doing just that in “Die Tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”) – composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s poignant opera about the struggle with haunting memories of a lost loved one, that captures the final chapter of the Romantic era – which will be presented by the Boston Symphony O...

Lea Salonga, who makes her home in New York, was in Los Angeles recently when she took time out for a telephone call to discuss her new holiday album, her debut with the Boston Pops, and more....

For the second straight year, Front Porch Arts Collective, Boston’s leading Black theater company, is presenting a “Holiday Feast” of staged readings of Christmas episodes from classic Black sitcoms, at Central Square Theater, December 12–14....

Actor and singer Sarah Milnamow grew up in Northborough watching the classic animated television special “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” every year....

Boston has a long history with “A Christmas Carol.” Victorian-era author Charles Dickens gave his first American reading of the holiday classic at Tremont Temple in December 1867 while he was living just a block away at the Parker House....

Janet Eilber was a high school senior at Michigan’s Interlochen School for the Arts when she first crossed paths with modern dance legend Martha Graham (1894–1991). After auditioning for Graham, the dancer and actor attended the Juilliard School at Graham’s recommendation, and subsequently joi...

Teal Wicks first performed “Shakespeare Meant for Kids” when she was in the fifth grade, and later, while in college at U.C. Irvine, the actor and singer did a production of “Romeo & Juliet” set to a Motown soundtrack. ...

Kelli O’Hara says there’ll be some surprises in store when she plays Groton Hill Music Center on November 2. 'My music director and pianist, Dan Lipton, and I won’t finalize the set list until we get there. We like to arrive at a venue, get a feel for the space, and then set the list. I always...

Actor Karen MacDonald has done everything from the classics to contemporary dramas, comedies, and musicals – including some 70 productions as a founding member of the American Repertory Theater – on greater Boston stages and beyond. Read our interview....

Over the past decade, performer Carly Sakolove has appeared in “Mamma Mia!” on land – in the 2013–2014 North American tour – and at sea on Royal Caribbean cruise lines....

If you’re a fan of the 1962 feature film “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” and eager to learn more about the story that inspired the cult classic, then you may want to head to The Company Theatre in Norwell, now through October 27, for “Baby Jane.”...

Kansas City audiences do not often get the opportunity to see World Premiere productions of plays by Tony Award winning playwrights.  This makes the current New Theatre & Restaurant production of Joe DiPietra’s new play “An Old-Fashioned Family Murder” starring “All In The Family’s” Sal...