Rachel Padula-Shufelt News

Disney's Freaky Friday just opened at North Shore Music Theatre. Based on the 1972 novel by Mary Rodgers. It was then made into a movie by Disney in 1976 staring Jody Foster and Barbara Harris, with a less memorable movie remake in 2018. It is now a newly created, fun family musical with all the bells and whistles.

Bill Hanney's award-winning North Shore Music Theatre (NSMT) continues the 2019 Musical Season with Disney's FREAKY FRIDAY, a brand-new motherdaughter body swap musical playing for two-weeks only from Tuesday, July 9 thru Sunday, July 21, 2019. Disney's FREAKY FRIDAY is sponsored by Big Jim's Auto Body.

Gloucester Stage Company opens its 40th Anniversary Season with a nostalgic romp in the park, specifically Neil Simon's 1963 hit play, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Pairing McCaela Donovan and Joe Short (who are married in real life) as the young newlyweds moving from their blissful six-day honeymoon into a Manhattan sixth-floor walk up is a stroke of luck for Director Shana Gozansky. Making her GSC debut, she didn't have to worry about establishing trust and comfort in the romantic aspects of the characters' relationship. Not only do Donovan (Corie) and Short (Paul) fit together hand in glove, but Paula Plum and Richard Snee, another offstage married couple, complete the cast and contribute immeasurably to the hilarity.

Oklahoma! is the first musical written by the team of composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II. The musical is based on Lynn Riggs' 1931 play, Green Grow the Lilacs. Set in farm country outside the town of Claremore, Indian Territory, in 1906, it tells the story of farm girl Laurey Williams and her courtship by two rival suitors, cowboy Curly McLaine and the sinister and frightening farmhand Jud Fry. A secondary romance concerns cowboy Will Parker and his flirtatious fiancee, Ado Annie.

Bill Hanney's award-winning North Shore Music Theatre (NSMT) kicks off the 64th Annual Season with Rodgers and Hammerstein's OKLAHOMA!, one of the greatest classic musicals of all time, playing for two-weeks only from Tuesday, June 4 thru Sunday, June 16, 2019. OKLAHOMA! is sponsored by Beverly Bank.

Once upon a time, a guy and a girl meet on the streets of Dublin, bond over their shared passion for music, enrich each other's lives, and find the way forward to the separate paths that their lives were meant to follow. With its current homegrown production of ONCE, SpeakEasy Stage Company demonstrates once again its penchant for capturing the essence of an award-winning musical and successfully molding it to fit the expectations of their audience and the parameters of the Roberts Studio Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts. It was announced today that the run is extended for an additional week due to overwhelming demand.

Due to overwhelming demand, SpeakEasy Stage Company has added seven more performances of its acclaimed production of the Tony Award-winning musical ONCE.  The show will now play through Sunday, April 7, 2019.  

SpeakEasy Stage Company will proudly present the Boston Regional Theatre Premiere of the Tony Award-winning musical ONCE.

SpeakEasy Stage Company will proudly present the Boston Regional Theatre Premiere of the Tony Award-winning musical ONCE.

1776 is a show that appreciates in value and import when viewed in the context of its time. It opened on Broadway in 1969 when Richard Nixon was president, the controversial war in Vietnam raged on, and civil unrest was the domestic order of the day. With that backdrop, it's popularity was unexpected, yet it ran for 1,217 performances and won three Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Seems like an ideal time for a remount of the story of our Founding Fathers, and the New Repertory Theatre production has found a formula to make it fresh, exhilarating, and inclusive.

New Rep Theatre in Massachusetts's gender-bent production of 1776 is now on stage! The production is set to run at the Mosesian Center for the Arts through December 23rd.

BroadwayWorld has a first look at New Rep Theatre in Massachusetts's gender-bent production of 1776 this holiday season! The production is set to run at the Mosesian Center for the Arts through December 23rd.

World premiere musical theater piece adapted by Davone Tines and Michael Schachter from 1931 Langston Hughes poem, 'The Black Clown.' Dramatic monologue with orchestral accompaniment is part elegy, part declaration of independence, and part celebration which resonates in 2018 America. Tines gives a full-throated performance as the titular character with support from a twelve-person ensemble of singularly-talented singers and dancers.

BroadwayWorld has learned that New Rep Theatre in Massachusetts will stage a gender-bent production of 1776 this holiday season! The production is set to run at the Mosesian Center for the Arts November 30th through December 23rd.

Boston Playwrights' Theatre hosted the North American premiere of THE ROSENBERGS (AN OPERA) the past two weekends. It moves to Spingold Theater Center at Brandeis University for three performances next weekend. A co-production of Boston University and Brandeis, the opera features music by Joachim Holbek, libretto by Rhea Leman, and is directed by Dmitry Troyanovsky. Moving performances by Brian Church and Christie Lee Gibson breathe life into Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as real people who lived a tragic love story.

SpeakEasy Stage Company's New England premiere production of SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE is a meaty, fast-paced comic romp with lots of sizzle to go with that steak. Jennifer Ellis and new leading man in town, George Olesky, are a match made in heaven, surrounded by a talented ensemble that includes Nancy E. Carroll, Remo Airaldi, Eddie Shields, and Lewis D. Wheeler. Director Scott Edmiston wrangles a cast of 18 into a cohesive bundle of joy

From January 12 to February 10, 2018, SpeakEasy Stage Company will present the New England premiere of the hit London comedy SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.

Boston Playwrights' Theatre presents the Boston premiere of Molly Smith Metzler's own revision of her charming, funny 2011 play ELEMENO PEA. Set at the end of the summer on Martha's Vineyard, a couple of blue collar siblings from Buffalo try to reconnect with each other while caught up in the world of pink pants and new money. Metzler also writes for film and television (ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, SHAMELESS), and this production is ready for prime time.

Boston Playwrights' Theatre opens its 36th season with Cliff Odle's ode to jazz and its place in the transitional period of the late 1950s to early 1960s. Director Diego Arciniegas does a first-rate job of translating Odle's play with music into a living, breathing entity with a rhythmic ebb and flow. An ensemble of seven actors and three live musicians give the play a real-life, real time quality that makes us feel like we are in Mitzy's Jazz Kitchen in Harlem in 1959.

SpeakEasy Stage Company opens its 27th season with the Boston-area premiere of MEN ON BOATS, directed by Dawn Simmons, and featuring an all-female design team and a racially diverse, non-male cast. The playwright specifies in the script that the actors are to be female-identifying, trans-identifying, gender fluid, and/or non-gender-conforming, but no cisgender white males. Even as she bases the play on the known history and Major John Wesley Powell's own journal of the events on his 1869 expedition, Jaclyn Backhaus flips the narrative by altering the nature of the cast of characters.