Huntington Theatre

While last season was financially challenged and less successful than his first one as artistic director, Nicholas Martin was widely applauded for restoring stability and artistic integrity to the historic Williamstown Theatre Festival. Martin, now 71, has announced that he will step down after the coming 2010 season.

In the spirit of gift giving the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston will conduct a one day sale on Thursday, December 10. Selected performances are being offered at just $25.

Set at Christmas in and around Washington, D.C. in 1864, A Civil War Christmas at the Huntington Theatre Company portrays a number of poignant stories of various individuals including the Lincolns, soldiers on both sides of the conflict and runaway slaves. The narrative is told in a lovely tapestry of song as well as often with poetic words. The voices and acting are superb. Created by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel, it is a tough and humanly complex story to tell well and stylishly.

With a combination of budget cuts, a reduced schedule and mixed reviews the second season for Williamstown Theatre Festival artistic director, Nicholas Martin, proved to be challenging. In 2010 Martin will work with a new general manager Joe Finnegan. This appointment has been announced by WTF.

Playwright August Wilson chronicled the African-American experience in the 20th Century by setting a play in each decade. These very American stories display and dissect the humanity of what it meant to be Black in a prejudiced predominant white society. The 6th in the cycle, Fences is triumphantly brilliant at the Huntington Theatre Company.

The veteran actor Will LeBow performs as a piano playing ghost in the world premiere of the Melinda Lopez play "Caroline In Jersey" at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. We met to discuss the past 32 years in theatre with the last 17 years in the company of the American Repertory Theatre.

There is a hive of activity surrounding Williamstown Theatre Festival's premiere of Caroline in Jersey, and a lot of the buzz surrounds actors Lea Thompson and Matt McGrath, and the return of Laika, the Russian Canine Cosmonaut. This new play sounds so strange that those involved won't reveal much about it. But dig we must, and they threw us a bone or two.

Last summer Justin Waldman directed the one man play 'The Atheist" which ran Off Broadway from September through January after two weeks at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He sat with us to discuss "What Is the Sound of Thunder?" by Noah Haidle which he has directed in its world premiere at WTF.

Last summer John Douglas Thompson received rave reviews, including Ben Brantley in the New York Times, for his performance in "Othello" at Shakespeare & Company. He earned an Obie Award for its Off Broadway production. He returns to Lenox with "Othello" as well as "The Dreamer Examines His Pillow" through September 6. There is a strong possibility he will perform "The Emperor Jones" Off Broadway this season.

The Tony and Drama Desk nominated (2007) actor, Brooks Ashmanskas, will be back on Broadway in January with Noel Coward's "Present Laughter" starring Victor Garber and directed by Nicholas Martin. Ashmanskas is currently starring in Martin's production of Jonathan Marc Sherman's "Knickerbocker" which premieres at Williamstown Theatre Festival. It brings together several Bennington College alumni.

In recent years the Berkshires has emerged as a major theatre community. With four professional companies and eight stages it's becoming a force in American theatre. And behind the scenes there is another show going on as well. Read all about it.

Just a week before the start of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which opens on July 1 and runs through August 23, the artistic director, Nicholas Martin, took time from rehearsals to discuss his second season in the Berkshires, cutbacks in the face of a tough economy, and an ongoing personal struggle to recover from a stroke he suffered in September.

Pirates are always an interesting subject. Lately, the romance has been taken away by the threatening, even deadly Somali pirates on the waterways off the Horn of Africa. But a revival of positive pirate interest may evolve from the wonderful Pirates! at the Huntington Theatre Company. It is a compellingly entertaining late Spring entertainment.

There is a long standing relationship between the American Repertory Theatre and arguably the greatest American playwright of his generation, David Mamet. While ART has seen world premieres of several of his plays it is currently staging a mini festival with "Romance" (2005) on its main stage, the Loeb Drama Center, and two successive Mamet productions for its smaller Zero Arrow Theatre.

As Berkshire Fine Arts has stretched to cover more Boston theatre, the Elliot Norton Awards have looked westward to honor several of the Berkshire's best.

For an opportunity to see the new generation of theatre at its best check out "Speech & Deliver" which is having its premiere at Lyric Stage in Boston. The very young Stephen Karam has written an awesomely hilarious play.

The late August Wilson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award premiered a number of his plays at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston. The 2009-2010 Huntington season will highlight a production of his acclaimed "Fences."

Like some sort of metaphorical wrestling match, Richard Goodwin has dramatized the science versus religion controversy of Galileo and Pope Urban VIII as an ongoing dispute between the logic of science and the emotion of religion. However, Galileo is very emotional about his science, and this Pope feels very logical about his religion. The wrestling is a verbal torrent interestingly framed. Even though we side with one over the other intellectually, the problem is whether are not we are made to really care about who actually wins.

Spiro Veloudos has been a fixture on the Boston theatre scene for more than thirty years, and is currently Producing Artistic Director of Lyric Stage. In a revealing conversation, he gives us a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to run a Boston theatre company.

Given the poor economy, artistic director, Nicholas Martin, has reduced the number of Nikos Stage productions from five to three plays and shortened the seaon (July 1 through August 23) by two weeks. By making these cuts he has avoided any compromise of the quality of productions for one of the nation's most renowned theatre companies.

The Corn is Green is a delightful play about hope and redemption. Set in a Welsh coal mining village, the narrative follows an eccentric spinster's journey of educating the children of the area in spite of community opposition and personality quirks. Her unsophisticated star pupil has the ability to gain a scholarship to Oxford, but fate and love raise their hands.

We dropped in on Elizabeth Aspenlieder and the director Adrianne Krstansky as they were rehearsing the one woman play "Bad Dates" by Theresa Rebeck. It runs through March 8 at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox. It's the first winter production in the new Evelyn P. Bernstein Theatre.

From the lights on the Boston Common, to the lights on the marquees, Boston knows how to celebrate the Holidays. Their traditions have long histories and deep roots, from the Holiday Pops and Handel & Haydn Messiah to the Christmas Revels and The Nutcracker. To help you plan your holiday entertainment, here is a preview and guide for Boston Holiday Events 2008.

This boffo hit has been extended to December 13. Beginning in August 1968 with Russian tanks rolling into Prague and flower children mellowing in Cambridge, England and ending in 1990 with the tanks rolling out of Prague and the Rolling Stones rocking and rolling, this is a sweeping panoramic drama spanning two very different countries, three interconnected generations, and 22 unstable years. The Huntington showcases Tom Stoppard brilliantly intertwining love, rock and roll and the fall of Communism.

From a teenage sexpot in Shampoo with Warren Beatty to a sexy Princess Leia in Star Wars with the intergalactic hairstyle of all time, Carrie Fisher was well on her way to becoming, if not a Tinseltown icon like her mother Debby Reynolds, a second generation Hollywood star. Somehow the hair-raising trauma of her dysfunctional family life, personal addictions and bipolar condition derailed her adult life. One of the results is this clever, witty and often brilliant telling of the highs and mostly lows of her unique life. She says it best, " If my life wasn't funny, it would just be true, and that's unacceptable." Pop culture at its twisted best, laughing with Carrie Fisher is phenomenal.