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What the Jews Believe at Berkshire Theatre Group
Written and directed by Mark Harelik
By: - Sep 29th, 2019The only Jewish family in a rural Texas town struggles with issues of illness and faith. How can the Jewish Yaweh allow the young and innocent to die of cancer while Jesus Christ offers cure and redemptio. Written and directed by Mark Harelik What the Jews Believe asks questions for which there are no answers.
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New York Philharmonic Pairs Schoenberg and Bartok
From Sweden Come Rich New Takes
By: - Sep 29th, 2019The New York Philharmonic became an opera orchestra for Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Bela Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. A Swedish cast, including the incomparable Nine Stemme and directed by Bengt Gomer, provided new twists to the tales, emphasizing the real or imagined murder of an errant lover and possible survival of an eighth wife of Bluebeard. His beard is not blue, and attractions go beyond a castle and riches.
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Alvin Ouellet at Real Eyes Gallery
Plein Air Paintings and Prints of Adams and North Adams
By: - Sep 27th, 2019With poetic irony, visitors to Ouelett’s one man exhibition at Real Eyes Gallery in Adams literally walk past his subject matter. To verify the veracity of his depictions one need but stand and gawk about on Park Street.
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Free For All by Megan Cohen
Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco
By: - Sep 27th, 2019Isn’t Free Fall supposed to be an adaptation of Strindberg’s masterpiece Miss Julie? Many adaptations of plays update the timeline and shift the locale to one that is familiar to the audience, but playwright Megan Cohen adds a new plot layer of climate change and turns the original play’s dark humor and sharp edges into farce.
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Liszt Performed in the Catacombs
Jenny Lin and Adam Tendler, a Remaarkable Double Team
By: - Sep 27th, 2019Pianists Jenny Lin and Adam Tendler took on one of Franz Liszt’s early and most demanding compositions, alternating roles as performance artists and page turners. Yamaha had delivered a grand piano which just fit between the arched stone walls of the Catacombs at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The lid of the piano was completely removed, allowing a bright, distinctive tone to emerge, even when so many notes cascaded that it might have been difficult to distinguish one from another. Erotic and religious ecstasy erupted.
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Opera Philadelphia's Love for Three Oranges
Prokovief's American Opera Mounted Like Lollipops
By: - Sep 24th, 2019Apparently the audience for the Sunday performance of Love for Three Oranges at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia was only the second best audience so far. The best, 1,300 school children who had earlier found this work irresistible. It is.
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Joseph Keckler to Die for at Opera Philadelphia
Making the Case for Death
By: - Sep 24th, 2019Joseph Keckler takes on the subject of singing in opera with a unique flare for the dramatic, for humor and deep delve. He is a masterful monologuist. In Let Me Die, he goes to the center of the operatic volcano, the death song. Here divas have been challenged since Monteverdi to blast out their pain in dying with vocal chords wide open and lungs at full mast. Yet they are fading away. Neither singer nor composer has ever been much disturbed by the odd idea that someone is going to a breathless state with lungs belting
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Harold Pinter's Betrayal
Director Jamie Lloyd's Broadway Revival
By: - Sep 23rd, 2019Pinter tells this story with a twist – the play begins two years after the affair has ended, and ends as the affair is beginning.
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Man Of La Mancha
An MNM Theatre Company Production
By: - Sep 23rd, 2019West Palm Beach-based MNM Theatre Comapny delves deeper into Man of La Mancha. This production isn't just a showcase for great singers singing glorious songs. Director Bruce Linser emphacizes the darkness of the prison scenes. MNM's mounting features strong acting, singing.
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Opera Philadelphia Presents Denis and Katya
Philip Venables and Ted Huffman Update Romeo and Juliet
By: - Sep 23rd, 2019Opera Philadelphia presents Denis and Katya, the world premiere of a new opera by Philip Venables and Ted Huffman. Keenia Ravvinia is credited both with creative contributions and translation of the events surrounding the dual death of two fifteen year old Russians. The teens had holed up in a cabin where weapons were stored and used them to attack the police. No one really knows what happened, but it was an event that was covered by the young couple in smart phone videos and periscope posts and widely picked up by the media.
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This is Why We Live at La Mama
Open Heart Surgery Theatre Presents Physical Take
By: - Sep 22nd, 2019Coleen MacPherson and her talented company bring 21 poems of the Polish poet Wslsawa Symborska to the stage. Symborska, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, provides a 'script' which is both lyrical and amusing. The collaborative vision of Open Heart Surgery was born in Toronto in 2014, but this all female ensemble is international in both personnel and its vision.
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Skintight at LA's Geffen Playhouse
Broadway Star Idina Menzel
By: - Sep 20th, 2019The promise of high energy singer/actor Idina Menzel’s debut on the Geffen’s stage is sure to lure her fans. Playwright Joshua Harmon’s newest and talky comedy play “Skintight” is directed by Daniel Aukin. Geffen’s artistic director, Matt Shakman, may have missed the mark by selecting “Skintight” for the Geffen’s 2019/2020 season opener.
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Joshua Roman and Conor Hanick at The Crypt
Arvo Part and Alfred Schnittke Featured
By: - Sep 19th, 2019Joshua Roman on cello and Conor Hanick at the piano performed a wild, raucous Alfred Schnittke Sonata bracketed by two transcendental works by Arvo Pärt. Andrew Ousley speaking at the outset as we waited for the artists to descend into the arched naves, suggested that we refrain from applauding at the end of each work. Instead we might absorb the afterglow of the music and let it seep further in. No one was tempted to break the silence with an inadvertent clap.
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Sea Wall/A Life at Broadway's Hudson Theatre
With Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge
By: - Sep 19th, 2019Sea Wall/A Life, two extraordinarily powerful one act plays, presented in monologue form, are holding court at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Fueled by strong reviews, and the star power of film and stage actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Strurridge, it is one of the most deeply moving productions currently gracing the stage here in New York City.
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Martin Moran's One Man Show, All the Rage
The Barrow Group Presents the Award-WInning Mono Drama
By: - Sep 18th, 2019Martin Moran performs his one-man show, All The Rage, at the Barrow Group through October 5. Thoroughly entertaining, it tackles one of the deepest of subjects: forgiveness for unforgivable offenses. Seth Barrish directed this award-winning show.
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Romeo and Juliet by Charles Gounod
Produced by San Francisco Opera
By: - Sep 17th, 2019Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet faithfully follows Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative and adds a score of great beauty that has graced the repertory since its spectacular debut in 1867. San Francisco Opera’s faithful production possesses sterling artistry and striking staging that honor this compelling opera.
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Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss
Produced by Opera San Jose
By: - Sep 17th, 2019The intersection of the world of grand opera and musical confection rarely occurs. An exception to that rule would be Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus. Maestro Michael Morgan maintains brisk pace throughout the musical sections, resulting in a spirited rendering of the score.
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Time Stands Still By Donald Marguiles
Ends Season for Shakespeare & Company
By: - Sep 16th, 2019Instead of a brief essay from the director the Shakespeare & Company playbill uses that space to list journalists killed "on assignment in 2019." Ten years ago Time Stands Still by Donald Margulies earned two Tony nominations. Four fine performances, and superb direction, were squandered on a play that is not aging well. Taking on an important subject, the bravery and sacrifice of journalists covering war zones, the play is contrived and reaches for cheap tricks entailing reversal and deception.
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Boston Rocker Ric Ocasek at 75
With Ben Orr Founded The Cars
By: - Sep 16th, 2019The counterculture in Boston geared up in the summer of 1968. The music scene, WBCN, and alternative media were well established when The Cars emerged with a self titled album in 1978. They went on to record a string of hits breaking up a decade later. After kicking around with a variety of folk/ rock configurations Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr established a mega group that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year. Orr died in 2000 and Ocasek died yesterday at 75. They were an integral part of a golden age of Boston rock.
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Hitchcock's Psycho Score at NY Philharmonic
Orchestra Performs Bernard Hermann's Classic
By: - Sep 15th, 2019The New York Philharmonic performed the New York premiere of Bernard Hermann’s Psycho score, accompanying a huge projection of the film. Richard Kaufman, a veteran conductor of film and television productions, conducted. David Geffen Hall was filled with a hip audience of film buffs, who cheered when the classic image of the Bates Motel first appeared on the screen.
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Amadeus at North Coast Repertory Theatre
Sir Peter Schaffer’s Musical Still Rocks Mozart
By: - Sep 15th, 2019Director Baird’s bold vision required him to strip-down the script to 10 performing characters without sacrificing any of the drama and/or light comedy moments that run throughout Shaffer’s illuminating, potent, tragic story concerning the early death, at 35 years of age, of musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (an astonishing Rafael Goldstein).
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Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater
Interviews by Mark Larson
By: - Sep 14th, 2019Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater is a book you can enjoy in two ways. You can read it from beginning to end, as you would any narrative of fiction or nonfiction. Or you can dip in and out and read Mark Larson’s marvelous interviews with Chicago theater people in any order—and to any stage of completion—that you like.
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Don’t Give a Crap
Solid Gold Commode Gone Missing
By: - Sep 14th, 2019The rich are different from us. As a symbol of ultimate decadence Maurizio Cattelan created "America" a sold gold toilet. I lined up to take a pee in it at the Guggenheim Museum. Now it has gone missing.
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Reggae Band Steel Pulse
The Cabot Theater, Beverly, Mass.
By: - Sep 14th, 2019Performing at the Cabot Theater in Beverly, to a packed and “on your feet” audience, David Hinds (vocals, guitarist) and longtime bandmate Selwyn Brown (keyboardist) kept an edge to their message of social and political outrage. The evening featured the first release by Steel Pulse in over a decade "Mass Manipulation" (2019, Rootfire Cooperative / Wiseman Doctrine).
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Hairspray in Indianapolis
A Beef & Boards Dinner Theater production
By: - Sep 13th, 2019Hairspray is receiving an exuberant production by Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre in Indianapolis.The musical, based on John Waters' film, reminds us that we can each do our part to right wrongs. This production runs through Oct. 6.
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