BOSTON THEATER REVIEWS

Beginning in darkness with the sounds of the sea, we launch into a film that directly serves as a companion to a well-constructed soundtrack. Seattle-based director and creator Clyde Petersen opens the autobiographical work with a delightfully familiar reimagining of a coming-of-age story cliche....

The Boston premiere of Lucy Kirkwood's 2018 Tony Award-nominated play THE CHILDREN at SpeakEasy Stage Company is an affecting drama, thanks to a combination of the playwright's excellence at her craft, Director Bryn Boice's focus, and the trio of Elliot Norton Award-winning actors whose portrayals c...

Boston Ballet's rEVOLUTION: Dance on the Edge features three works by pivotal choreographers which stretch the label 'contemporary' to its breaking point. The three pieces, which all premiered between 1957-1987 may trace through the timeline of progress for commercial ballet in America, but I questi...

For playwright Max Posner, sitting down to write The Treasurer must have been a feat of de-centering oneself. The narrative takes a dusky, balmy look back at the relationship between his father and his grandmother, a wealthy, New York socialite who lived with dementia in her old age. While the story...

For a long time within their history, Company One has cornered the market in Boston for selecting those cutting-edge new works that are able to effectively spark conversations and juxtaposing them against each other in ways that are both productive and incendiary. Hats off to Director of New Work, I...

With costumes by Trinity Koch, lighting by Lucas Pawelski, sound by Alex Sovronsky, stage management by Rachel Lynne Harper, and line production by Nora Zahn, ten new plays presented by six fine performers under the guidance of two strong directors, the  10 x 10 NEW PLAY FESTIVAL continues at Barri...

It is interesting to look at the history of art and entertainment by analyzing the innovations which have been deemed exclusively novelties and written off as fleeting trends by their contemporaries. For film, color and sound were both considered by many to be cheap gimmicks that would quickly fade ...

With friends like The Plastics, who needs enemies? That's the basic premise for the surprisingly fresh and sometimes scathingly funny high school musical MEAN GIRLS written by Emmy Award winner Tina Fey based on her 2004 hit film. Treading the familiar teen angst territory of cafeterias, locker room...

In David Mamet's book On Directing Film, he breaks down the way a linear narrative can be conveyed by placing images in direct contrast to each other. a?oeThe dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.a?? Certainly, with a majority of the action taking place up...

Sutton Foster, since her Tony Award-winning break through as the title role in Thoroughly Modern Millie, has been one of the select leading ladies who have held a decades-spanning monopoly on Broadway's biggest musicals. Foster holds the distinction of being one of the gawkiest, most palatably quirk...

Why isn't this show an impersonation of cool even if it falls into some trappings of the dreaded 'regional theatre' scene? I think it's because Praxis Stage is, at its heart, genuinely concerned with the prospects of theatre that every other theatre in this city needs to purport to care about in ord...

HUNDRED DAYS and the intimate Black Box at the Umbrella Stage Company in Concord are a perfect match, not unlike Abigail and Shaun Bengson, the couple whose true story of their romantic and musical journey is told in this original song cycle. Staged like a concert before a few cabaret-style tables a...

Queer couples in the greater Boston area: if you are looking for a mushy, warm, romantic gay love story with a backbone and plenty of heartbreak that will make you want to cuddle up with your partner between now and Valentine's Day weekend, you couldn't do much better than Actors' Shakespeare Projec...

David Valdes has seen the future and it doesn't look good. If you're already losing sleep over the onrush of climate change, if the rollback of environmental regulations makes your blood boil, and if you fret about the steady departure of actual scientists from government agencies, Valdes' play LAST...

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom was the most produced American play of 2010. 10 years later, Wellesley Repertory Theatre has brought it back, directed by artistic director, Marta Rainer, armed with the proverbial program note toting its enduring relevance. In a way, it seems to wittily comment on the 'N...

One of the inescapable pillars of the human condition is the universal narcissism with which we consume media. Entirely incapable of existing within a vacuum with the narratives presented to us, we search films, theatre, books, songs, and television for those personal implications we are certain the...

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court handed a narrow victory to a Christian baker from Colorado who refused for religious reasons to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Hailing from a conservative North Carolina background, playwright Bekah Brunstetter is personally familiar with people like Della, th...

If you like your coming-of-age-on-the-mean-streets stories served with an extra side of red sauce, then Chazz Palminteri's semi-autobiographical A BRONX TALE is for you. Featuring characters with names like Rudy the Voice, Eddie Mush, Jojo the Whale and Frankie Coffeecake, this musical adaptation of...

SpeakEasy Stage Company presents the New England premiere of Antoinette Nwandu's PASS OVER, in a co-production with The Front Porch Arts Collective. In this intense drama performed without intermission, two young Black men represent the lives of countless others like them who have dreams of reaching...

MAYTAG VIRGIN is a slice of life, character-driven romantic comedy about two forty-something school teachers, both widowed, who meet cute in their connecting yards in a fictional town in Alabama. Good fences make good neighbors and their lack of one leads to many challenges, but they are both warm p...

a??a??a??a??a??a??a??CATS opened at the Citizen's Bank Opera House Tuesday night. Directed by Trevor Nunn the current Broadway tour of CATS, with choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler based on the original Choreography by Gillian Lynne, is terrific. The pacing is perfect, and the acting, singing, and ...

You know those cartoons where the little fish is eaten by a bigger fish and then, just when you think everything is going to be fine, that fish is eaten by an even bigger fish? That kind of sums up how Molly Smith Metzler's 2017 play, Cry It Out unfolds in its new production by Apollinaire Theatre C...

Arguably, for a certain age group, there are no greater cultural influences than Harry Potter and Spongebob Squarepants. (Cue laments from the homeschooled crowd that they were never permitted to engage with such low-brow, mind-numbing media. Those of us with less protective mothers are doing just f...

In a recent review for Actors' Shakespeare Project's King Lear, I tried to boil down what an audience can expect from any piece the group presents. (Thanks to their conveniently affordable student tickets, they are a theatre from whom I have perhaps seen more productions than any other company.) I p...

From what I can tell, THE CHRISTMAS REVELS is one of those much-loved traditions that people look forward to revisiting year after year, like a performance of THE NUTCRACKER or A CHRISTMAS CAROL, or taking the kids to see Santa Claus. However, unlike those other holiday seasonal shows, the REVELS ...