BOSTON THEATER REVIEWS

New Repertory Theatre dusts off an old chestnut for a family-friendly, non-holiday, crowd-pleasing offering as their gift for the season. Lionel Bart's OLIVER!, based on Charles Dickens' novel OLIVER TWIST, is known to be a little dark, with its themes of orphans, child exploitation, and vast income...

As the year winds to a close, and the holiday hustle and bustle keeps us spinning our wheels, it can be a salve for the spirit and rest for the weary to sit in a darkened theater for a couple of hours. There is a plethora of seasonal fare competing for your entertainment dollars, but may I suggest s...

The much-anticipated MOBY DICK (A Musical Reckoning), from the team that brought you NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 in 2015, has finally surfaced at the Loeb Drama Center of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. Based on the iconic American novel by Herman Melville, the three-and-a...

There's not a Christmas tree in sight, but there's plenty of uplifting, feel good spirit in the Umbrella Stage Company's TUCK EVERLASTING, the third production of their inaugural season in their gleaming new building in Concord. Under the direction of Elliot Norton Award-winner Nancy Curran Willis, ...

Space, the final frontier, has finally been explored by Ryan Landry and the Gold Dust Orphans, and their little dog, too. Following the trail blazed by her predecessor, the late, beloved Rhoda the dog, Dolly the Mustache Pup has a featured spot in CHRISTMAS ON URANUS as one of the flying dogs of Plu...

DOLLY PARTON'S SMOKY MOUNTAIN CHRISTMAS CAROL delivers on the simplicity of its message of faith, family, and love, especially during the holiday season, and is a reflection of the heritage and values of its namesake. On opening night, the acclaimed country singer-songwriter surprised and delighted ...

In order to write about Open Theatre Project's 7th Annual Slam Boston (a series of home-grown 10 minute plays hosted at Boston Playwright's Theatre), one must first open up the discussion of the 'D' word. That's right, Boston. Let's talk about that 9-letter word that not only kills in Scrabble, but ...

Merrimack Repertory Theatre presents the second installment of what will become a trilogy co-written by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, about the close-knit sisters from Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Paralleling the upstairs Christmas-time festivities featured in last year's MISS BENNET: CH...

Producing Artistic Director Emeritus Spiro Veloudos is in the director's chair for AGATHA CHRISTIE'S MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS and stages Ken Ludwig's adaptation with distinct shadings of film noir and a who's who of Lyric Stage Company veterans (and a couple of newbies) on board to play the rogu...

What do you get when you mix aspects of GYPSY, THE BAD SEED, and ALL ABOUT EVE with a heavy dose of camp and a soupçon of soap opera? RUTHLESS! THE MUSICAL, an all-female homage to overly-ambitious child actors, sleazy agents, poison pen critics, and jealous understudies that is a star vehicle for ...

A septuagenarian suffering from Alzheimer's may seem an unlikely hero, but in QUIXOTE NUEVO, playwright Octavio Solis' adaptation of Miguel Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE, a retired Mexican-American college professor fearlessly takes on the Border Patrol, aids migrants, and models the importance of resilien...

a?oeUnlike any THE SEAGULL you can ever imaginea?? sums up the Arlekin Players Theatre production of Anton Chekhov's classic. An original adaptation with script translation by Ryan McKittrick, Julia Smeliansky, and Laurence Senelick, and directed by Igor Golyak, it features imaginative staging and t...

COME FROM AWAY, the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical warming Boston audiences now through November 17, is just the uplifting human tonic we need during these difficult and divided times. Charming, witty, heart-breaking but ultimately inspiring, COME FROM AWAY is the remarkable story of the 9000 N...

In two recent reviews of The Magic Flute and Fences, I have bemoaned Boston theatres' lack of accommodation made for the marginalized communities they attempt to serve. In sharp contrast,Tempest Reconfigured, a project produced by Fort Point Theatre Channel, takes the storyline of Shakespeare's fina...

When I first saw Boston Lyric Opera's promotional images for Fellow Travelers, a new opera by Greg Pierce and Gregory Spears, in a production that premiered at Minnesota Opera, I was incredibly wary. Photos of conventionally attractive white men in their boxers clinging to each other in a fit of pas...

Hub Theatre Company of Boston concludes its seventh season with an ambitious undertaking, the time-bending, courtroom dramatic comedy, THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT by Pulitzer Prize winning and Tony Award nominated playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis. Boston audiences will recognize his name from two...

Ronán Noone is an Irish-American playwright, an immigrant, who writes about what he knows and what he has lived. In his most recent work, THE SMUGGLER, which won the Best Playwright award at the 1st Irish Festival of New York, 2019, he allocates much of that knowledge and experience to the protagon...

The Umbrella Stage Company has baptized their newly renovated blackbox with an appropriately bleak production of August Wilson's Fences. The play is the third installment in Wilson's American Century Cycle, for which he wrote 10 plays about the Black American experience, one play per decade in the t...

The crotchety, old ushers at Emerson's Colonial Theatre prepared for battle as the two night run of John Leguizamo's Tony Award winning Latin History for Morons descended upon their gilded palace. The bawdy irreverence of the piece with its marked disdain for the systemic white-washing of American h...

ArtsEmerson continues its tradition of hosting world-class theatre pieces in Boston by presenting Isango Ensemble's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. The troupe, comprised of 21 black South African musicians, alternates nebulously between delivering recitative, dancing ebulliently, and playing...

Praxis Stage's Coriolanus is punk. It is metal. It is what too many theaters in Boston try to be and it succeeds in ways that should have the rest of the theatre community taking notes (or at least scrambling for tickets to their next production). Coriolanus is a late Shakespearean tragedy  that fo...

It turns out that Halloween weekend is a great time to see THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG, the hilarious Tony Award-winning Broadway comedy that is a virtual bag full of tricks and treats. A madcap play-within-a-play that gives off a distinct a?oehaunted manora?? vibe, this murder mystery farce (ending it...

Roald Dahl wrote books for the children of his time and it is a wonder that many of his creations have remained as popular and well-loved as they have decades after his death. Although James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Witches, and The Twits can all trace thematic influence back to Dahl's invo...

It's probably just a coincidence, but two fine plays currently running at two award-winning regional theaters share an unusual commonality. Both focus on the issue of white privilege and the prevailing attitude that acknowledging its existence will end it. In THE THANKSGIVING PLAY at Lyric Stage Com...

Last Night the BODYGUARD opened to a very warm audience reception at North Shore Music Theatre. The final offering of the 2019 regular musical season THE BODYGUARD is a new musical based on the smash hit 1992 film....