Hovey Players of Waltham (http://hoveyplayers.com) is proud to bring back “Hovey Summer Shorts” opening Friday, July 13. Hovey began this festival 16 years ago when it featured 10-minute “shorts”. Through the years, the festival evolved, incorporating short musicals, musical acts, short films, full one-act plays, and displayed works by local artists. This year’s festival features the “shorts” format featuring ten 10-minute plays by ten local playwrights. The festival is produced by Michael Haddad, a Hovey Board Member and Trustee. Continue reading
Tag Archives: MA
ADHD NPR – CAR TALK: THE MUSICAL
Car Talk: The Musical, book and lyrics Wesley Savick, original music by Michael Wartofsky, Underground Railway Theater & Suffolk University, Central Square Theater, 6/14/12-8/12/12, http://www.centralsquaretheater.org.
Reviewed by Craig Idlebrook
Charisma can carry a show a long way. Just look at what it did for Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a pair of goofball (and genius) brother-mechanics who talked their way into a hit show on National Public Radio. For 35 years, the pair has giggled their way through thousands of calls from car owners with mystery questions, strewing terrible puns and corny humor on the road as they went.
And now, on the eve of the brothers’ retirement from “Car Talk”, they have gotten themselves involved in a musical, written by Wesley Savick, with music by Michael Wartofsky. Continue reading
Cirque du Soleil: Serenity Under the Big Top
Totem, Cirque du Soleil, Marine Industrial Park, 6/10/12-7/15/12, http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/shows/totem/default.aspx.
(Boston, MA) It’s not logical or, frankly, believable that a circus featuring so many acrobats in body stockings could be capable of such grace. In performance, style, and message, though, Cirque du Soleil’s Totem is enthralling. I found the show unique and lovely among Boston’s other attractions this month. Continue reading
A Chorus Line: Meant for One, Singular Audience (That May Not Be You)
A Chorus Line, music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban, book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, Reagle Music Theatre, 6/15/12-6/24/12, http://www.reagleplayers.com/current.html.
Reviewed by Gillian Daniels
(Waltham, MA) The Reagle Music Theatre is a supportive, intimate venue I remember with pleasure from when I visited it to review Christmas Time. Reagle puts on the same high quality production in A Chorus Line, too, despite some difficulty with the microphones halfway through the play I sat through.
A Chorus Line fits for the Reagle even if the original material hasn’t aged well. Continue reading
Awesomeness on Wheels: ROLLER DISCO: THE MUSICAL
Roller Disco: The Musical, book by Sam Forman and Jen Wineman, lyrics by Sam Forman, music by Eli Bolin, Ministry of Theater and Club Oberon, 5/30/12-8/30/12, http://www.rollerdiscothemusical.com/Home.html.
Reviewed by Craig Idlebrook
(Cambridge, MA) Sometimes, you come across a play that works so effortlessly on so many levels that it skates circles around your standard theatrical fare. Club Oberon’s Roller Disco, glittery, vacant, hyper and hysterical, draws the audience into a disco-soaked world from the theme song’s opening strands. We have no choice but to harken back to striped tube socks, gritty skating rinks and cheesy eighties movies. Heck, we never even put up a fight. Continue reading
Happy Medium Theatre’s The American Plan
The American Plan by Richard Greenberg, Happy Medium Theatre Company, Factory Theatre, 6/8/12-6/16/12, http://www.happymediumtheatre.com/.
Feature by Gillian Daniels
Happy Medium Theatre’s The American Plan starts off light.
Set during an early-1960’s summer, a young couple meet cute and begin a hesitant courtship near a resort in the Catskill Mountains. The first act sets up initially simple obstacles, mysterious pasts and disapproving parents. By the second act, the play finally bears its teeth, revealing far more bile for the age than its nostalgic exterior would suggest. Continue reading
Connecting with the Cheerfully Cheesy “Xanadu”
Xanadu, book by Douglas Carter Beane, music and lyrics by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar, Speakeasy Stage Company, Roberts Studio Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, 5/11/12-6/9/12, http://www.speakeasystage.com/doc.php?section=showpage&page=xanadu.
Reviewed by Gillian Daniels
Xanadu, the 1980 film featuring Olivia Newton John and music by the Electric Light Orchestra, is well known for being a critical flop. The chief crime of this cinematic musical, however, is in creating entertainment that doesn’t connect with its audience. After all, it’s a movie about disco released a year after the genre died a largely un-mourned death. I’m hard pressed to find a better image of disconnection than that.
In being brought to the stage, Xanadu has finally found its correct medium. The show not only finds its audience but winks at it furiously throughout the course of the story. Continue reading
Trojan Women: An Atmospheric View of the Devastation of War
Trojan Women by Euripides,
Whistler in the Dark,
The Factory Theatre,
5/18/12-6/2/12, http://www.whistlerinthedark.com/productions/trojanwomenprod.html.
Reviewed by Anthony Geehan
(Boston, MA) The end of war is something that is looked on as a celebratory event. Images of servicemen returning home, country’s flags being raised, and a collective sigh of relief from the population are the usual symbols that are associated with victory. There is however always a losing side in a war who must deal with a devastated homeland, a shamed or exterminated army, and the loss of everything their civilization was or could ever be. Continue reading
Geeks Nerds and Artists Episode 7: Danny Bryck
Episode 7: Geeks, Nerds & Artists Podcast: Danny Bryck, local actor and dialect coach
No Room For Wishing–one man documentary play by Danny Bryck
READING: May 27 @ 2pm at Wall Street to Main Street Festival, BRIK Gallery, 473 Main St, Catskill, NY
http://www.facebook.com/events/311862005560920/
READING (Excerpts): June 20 @ 7pm at Hall Space, 950 Dorchester Avenue, Boston, MA
MORE TO COME IN THE SUMMER & FALL, http://dannybryck.com/noroomforwishing/
Danny Bryck is an actor, writer and theatre artist hailing from Amherst, Massachusetts.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Keeping the Bard on His Toes: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Much Ado About Nothing…With A Twist adapted by Daniel Morris, Bad Habit Productions, Deane Hall at Boston Center for the Arts, 4/28/12-5/13/12, http://www.badhabitproductions.org/shows/season/MuchAdo.html.
Review by Craig Idlebrook
(Boston, MA) There’s a funny story the actor Charles Grodin shares about famed acting teacher Uta Hagen, where Hagen was dissecting the terribleness of a scene Grodin had just done. She hated everything except for one moment when Grodin’s scene partner was slow to hand the actor a prop. Because there was a delay, Grodin looked genuinely concerned, and that, Hagen announced, was true acting.
I’m not a big fan of the Method myself, but I’m starting to see her point, especially when it comes to Shakespeare. Acting involves a weird combo of memorization and playful improvisation. But when it comes to the Bard’s work, too many productions are populated with actors who know they are saying weighty words and making weighty gestures; every move is preordained and dripping with importance. Such a style robs the lyrical and impish qualities of plays that once were performed for bawdy Elizabethans.
Luckily, there are productions like Bad Habit’s staging of Much Ado About Nothing to inject life into scripts that we have too long sanctified. Continue reading