Author Archives: Kitty Drexel

Oct 28

Lucy, you got some splainin’ to do: “Blackhollow: A Gothic Tale of Possession”

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Presented by Greater Boston Stage Company
By Weylin Symes
Directed by Weylin Symes and Daniel Begin
Featuring Anna Slate and Charlotte Gray (understudy)
Online Playbill 

Oct. 23 – Nov. 8, 2026
GBSC Main Stage
Stoneham, MA 02180

90 minutes with no intermission.

Trigger warnings: Body horror, medical misogyny, surgical gore, spooky basements.

Article by Kitty Drexel

STONEHAM, Mass. — Blackhollow: A Gothic Tale of Possession is horror. It depicts the torture of women. Its male characters call it “science,” but it’s historical torture with lab coats. In this gothic horror, adult men prey upon women and girls because they can. These male scientists see their victims as lab rats. Please, please respect your limits when buying a ticket.    

After witnessing her father commit her mother’s violent murder at the breakfast table, Lucy Cull (Anna Slate) is given employment in a 19th-century English criminal asylum. She is 11. Life working at the asylum forces Lucy to grow up quickly. Between the male doctors preying upon naive young women for sport or her malicious coworkers’ undeserved violence, Lucy must rely on her wits to survive.  Continue reading →

Oct 22

Joyfully Exploding Fixed Categories: Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors

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Photo by Benjamin Rose Photography.

Presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project 
By Gordon Greenberg & Steve Rosen
Directed by Christopher V. Edwards
Featuring: Thalia Gerloff, Doug Lockwood, Paul Melendy, Nicholas Papayoanou, Bobbie Steinbach

October 9 to November 1, 2026
The Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal Street
Watertown, MA 02472

Run time: 100 minutes, no intermission

Critique by Diana Lu

WATERTOWN, Mass. — The 1995 Mel Brooks film Dracula: Dead and Loving It was a childhood favorite of mine, so Greenberg and Rosen had big shoes to fill. I’m happy to report that Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors exceeded even my most petulant-nostalgic expectations. It is witty and fresh. It is feminist and gay. Watching it gave me a sense of safety, clarity, and expansion, and I wondered how much more theatre could challenge us to, as the playbill put it, “be dangerous and alive.”

A sharp and hilarious sendup of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire tale, Dracula ACOT begins with fussy and faint hearted (i.e. stereotypically Victorian) real estate broker, Jonathan Harker (Paul Melendy),  traveling to Transylvania to close a lucrative deal and enhance his career prospects before wedding his childhood sweetheart—who is waaaaaay out of his league. In Dracula’s castle, Harker’s photo of fiancée Lucy Westfeldt (Thalia Gerloff), a feminist firebrand with an extremely attractive neck, immediately becomes the vampire’s obsession. This leads our orientalist trope villain to infiltrate England to seek her out, leaving a trail of death, disease, madness, and queerness in his quest to sate his lust, bloodlust, and dopamine receptors. Continue reading →

Oct 19

With the Only Good Hand He Possesses: “To Kill a Mockingbird”

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Karl Kenzler, Karen Killeen; photo by Liza Voll.

Presented by The Huntington
By Aaron Sorkin
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Harper Lee  
Directed by Huntington Artistic Director Loretta Greco 
Music and vocals by Ashley Frith

October 8 – November 8, 2026
The Huntington Theatre
264 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115

TL;DR: The “TKAM” play is different from the novel. The Huntington’s production is great! Hire disabled actors to play disabled characters. 

Content Advisories: Explicit racial slurs, theatrical haze, and sound of a gunshot. This link for more→.

Run Time: Schedule 3 and a half hours from arrival to exit.

BOSTON — Apropos of nothing, let’s dig in.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is playing at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. In it, three children tell the story of Atticus Finch, Tom Robinson and a township’s failure of justice for a Black man. The 14th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees due process, not justice. 

The Huntington’s summary of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is HERE. 

The BBC has a comprehensive examination of Harper Lee’s novel with illustrations HERE. 

For those wondering, this adaptation of the novel differs in several important ways. First, the story is told through three narrators: child and adult Scout (Karen Killeen), her brother Jem (Benjamin Izaak), and their new friend Dill (Andrew Stevens), instead of one, Scout. The play occurs over one summer instead of the book’s multiple seasons. We don’t see Miss Maudie’s house burn down or the destruction of the mad dog. Boo Radley (a solemn Jesse Hinson) remains, but his interactions with the children are reduced.     Continue reading →

Oct 13

A Quest for Laughs and a Holy Grail: “Spamalot”

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(L-R) Claire Kennard, Lindsay Lee Alhady, Major Attaway, Delaney Benson, and Meridien Terrell in the North American Tour of SPAMALOT. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

Presented by Boch Center Wang Theatre
Book and Lyrics by Eric Idle
Music by John Du Prez & Eric Idle
Directed & Choreographed by Josh Rhodes
Music Directed by Jonathan W. Gorst

October 8 – 11, 2026
Boch Center Wang Theatre
270 Tremont St
Boston, MA 02116

Runtime: 2 hours and 20 minutes, including intermission.

Review by Helen Ganley

BOSTON — Arthurian Legend – a literary colossus within British history. The lore encompasses the trials, feats, and follies of King Arthur and his knights within the kingdom of Camelot. These narratives bestow their readers with messages of honor and chivalry. Spamalot, based around these foundational mythologies… Does not … (in the best way!) Spamalot, or as it’s properly titled and subtitled, Monty Python’s Spamalot; A musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” takes inspiration from an already vaudevillian and slapstick movie and cranks the silliness up tenfold in the way only theater can. Although the main quest is reminiscent of the original fables, King Arthur and his knights seek the holy grail, the show’s series of vignettes shows the team encountering outrageous and nonsensical barriers. Continue reading →

Oct 02

Everything and Everyone Has A Price: “Covenant”

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Anthony T. Goss as Johnny and Deannah “DRIPP” Blemur as Avery. Photo: Benjamin Rose Photography

Presented by SpeakEast Stage Company
By York Walker
Directed by Dawn M. Simmons
Featuring: Crystin Gilmore, Anthony T. Goss, Sydney Alicia Jackson, Deannah “DRIPP” Blemur, Kayla Sessoms

Sep. 25 through Oct. 17, 2026
Boston Center for the Arts

Critique by Kitty Drexel

TLDR: The cast & crew had a rough night on Wednesday. Covenant is Sinners meets Paranormal. Sorta.

BOSTON — Sometimes, the well-prepared elements of a play don’t meld during a performance. Only the muses know why. That appeared to be the case of the cast and crew of SpeakEasy’s Covenant on Wednesday evening: Actors lost their energy halfway through their lines and looked uneasy on stage, a sound cue misfired, tech persons were accidentally revealed during set changes. To these we say, let she who’s never persisted through a wonky performance cast the first stone. Continue reading →

Sep 22

Dear, Dead Days Beyond Recall: “All My Sons”

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Cast members of “All My Sons;” Photo by Benjamin Rose.

Presented by Lyric Stage of Boston
By Arthur Miller
Directed by Scott Edmiston
Compositions by Oleg Smirnov

Sep 23 – Oct 18, 2026
Lyric Stage
140 Clarendon Street
2nd Floor
Boston MA 02116

Critique by Kitty Drexel

TLDR: The Lyric’s production of All My Sons is sad, is triumphant. This family needs therapy. 

BOSTON — Arthur Miller’s All My Sons forces its male characters to face the consequences of their unscrupulous actions as businessmen, patriarchs, and neighbors. As they do, their female counterparts, their wives, sisters and mothers, perform the emotional and other invisible labor necessary to clean up the figurative and literal messes their men have made. This play contains themes such as survivor’s guilt, profit over principles, and the disillusionment of one white nuclear family’s American Dream after WWII, among others. The Lyric Stage’s production, directed by Scott Edmiston, runs in Boston through October 18. 

Each character of All my Sons intertwines with the next. Over three acts, we learn how the cast of characters are intentionally and unintentionally woven into each other’s half truths, secrets, and lies. It begins with self-made businessman Joe Keller (Bill Mootos) and neighborhood scion, a man who prides himself on building a manufacturing business for his nuclear family with his wife Kate (Laurie Marie Duncan) in Ohio. Their first son, Larry, was a pilot who went MIA during the war. Their second son, Chris (Mark Souza), survived as a decorated soldier and works in Joe’s factory. Years later, Joe, Katie and Chris still wrestle with Larry’s disappearance.  Continue reading →

Aug 23

An Infallible System of Interpretation: “Rhinoceros”

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Giamatti and Turturo in “Rhinoceros.” Photo by Hawver and Hall.

Presented by American Repertory Theater
By Eugene Ionesco
Translated by Derek Prouse
Directed by Diane Paulus

Aug. 14 – Sept. 27, 2026
Loeb Drama Center

Digital Playbill

Critique by Kitty Drexel

Runtime: Two hours, including one fifteen-minute intermission.

TLDR; Famous people on stage! Timely politics on stage! Vote the rhinoceri out.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Boston’s arts journalism is awash with news about the American Repertory Theatre’s production of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Rightly so, it’s a grand production worthy of its hype. Director Paulus is finally meeting a political moment as it occurs. She’s invited a grand, New York- and L.A.-based cast to play in Cambridge, MA. (Hello, Bostonian understudies! I appreciate you.) Ionesco’s plays lack universal appeal. Thanks to Derek Prouse’s translation, this charismatic production comes as close as one might get. 

Ionesco’s Rhinoceros dwells under the umbrella of the dramatist movement, the Theatre of the Absurd. TOTA, a 1950s & 1960s American and European theatre movement based on Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), posits the nihilistic/absurdist/existentialist belief that human existence is without meaning or purpose. Rather than do as Camus suggested, which was to find joy in the absurdity, playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco (the Romanian Beckett), Jean Genet (the French Ionesco), and Harold Pinter (the British Genet) decided to be depressed. 

Thanks, Reddit.

Continue reading →

Aug 10

It’s a Gift to be Phallic: “Pitbull’s Party at the End”

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Presented by Fork & Shoe Theatre Co-op
By Talia Rodriguez
Directed by Leo Leal

August 6-9, 2026
Chelsea Theatre Works

Critique by Kitty Drexel

The show runs approximately 95 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. Venue opens 30 minutes before the show.

TLDR: It’s complicated. There’s good; there’s not great. Keep going.

CHELSEA, Mass. — Pitbull’s Party at the End was an ambitious project debuted by Fork & Shoe Theatre Co-op at Chelsea Theatre Works on Aug. 6. Unfortunately, it closed early due to COVID. We offer our sincere condolences to the cast and crew. Y’all deserve to feel proud of the work you’ve done. Successfully producing an independent show is a minor miracle in these dark times.  

Pitbull’s Party at the End’s summary on the Fork & Shoe website: It’s 2042 and a hurricane threatens to wipe Miami off the map. Meanwhile, Mr. Worldwide (Carlos Fruzzetti, charismatic and funny) is performing his last ever New Year’s Eve concert, the Phallic brothers (David Feit Mann, Scott Schaeffer, Eli Bondar) are planning the business deal of a lifetime, and an intergenerational Cuban-Jewish family (Paola Ferrer, David Kleinman, Sophia Yael Koevary, Audrey Molina) must bridge their differences to survive the apocalypse.

Pitbull’s Party suffers from too many storylines and too many messages carrying equal importance. This one 95-minute play is about the ethnic cleansing of multiple societies, our global climate disaster, Jewish Cuban culture, billionaires’ atrocities, intergenerational queer identity, anticapitalist philosophy, and the Grammy-winning American rapper, singer, songwriter, and “actor” Armando Christian Pérez, aka Mr. 305, aka Mr. Worldwide, aka Miami’s bald zaddy, Pitbull. Carrying that many subplots in one play requires careful threading.  Continue reading →

Aug 05

We are all just prisoners here of our own device: “M: Refractions from an Evil Act”

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Grant and Hertzberg in “M.” Photo credit: Morganna Becker.

Presented by Exiled Theatre Company 
Written by James Wilkinson
Directed by Joe Juknievich
Starring: Julia Hertzberg, Sydney Grant, Tim Hoover and Peter Tone

July 31-Aug 9, 2026
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

Critique by Kitty Drexel

TLDR: M is a work in progress; the acting is top-notch.

BOSTON — M: Refractions from An Evil Act includes English and French dialogue. There are no subtitles. (My French is abysmal.) My impression is that we aren’t meant to understand the French dialogue in M. This helps us sympathize with M, the character… And hopefully anyone thrust into a hairy situation involving language skills they don’t possess. Including ourselves.

Playwright Wilkinson creates a comprehensive world within a David Lynchian hotel in which his characters eke out their fraught existence. He shows and tells its rules through consistent repetition. Then, à la Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, Wilkinson shows us what happens if characters don’t obey those rules: Characters collapse, disappear and reappear, alcohol is replaced with more alcohol… and the maid still comes to vacuum the guest room.  Continue reading →

Jul 25

Activism and Elitism are Kissing Cousins: “A New Era”

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Front – Patrice Jean Baptiste and MaConnia Chesser. Cast in background. Photo by Ken Yotsukura

Presented by Company One Boston
By Miranda Austen ADEkoje
Directed by Summer L. Williams
Dramaturgy by Lizzy Cooper Davis

July 18 – Aug. 8, 2026
The Strand Theatre
Online Playbill 

Critique by Kitty Drexel

Seating is general admission. This performance runs approximately 2 hours, including one 10-minute intermission.

TLDR: New plays are imperfect. Production under duress signifies resilience, fortitude, and mastery of one’s art.

DORCHESTER, Mass. — A New Era is a teaching play. It teaches us about the trailblazing careers of historical freedom-fighting Black women who accomplished great feminist works in Boston. The C1 website for A New Era tells us that this play was originally commissioned and developed for the National Park Service by Plays in Place as part of its Suffrage in Black & White series. This means A New Era was first developed to communicate many facts to an audience via dialogue in a short amount of time. It shouldn’t be judged by the same standards as another historically-based play about women’s voices such as, say, The Crucible. They are different genres with the same medium. Continue reading →