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Comedy Camp
Thirty years ago, Charles Ludlam wrote a comic masterpiece. Here, the Berkshire Theatre Group celebrates it with a ridiculously hysterical production on the Fitzgerald Main Stage in Stockbridge. The...
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A Truck With a Soul
“Can I do it?” one of the last contestants asks, standing just stage right of the Nissan pickup center stage, his left hand touching the truck’s body. As he looks out into the night, a young voice...
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A Compelling Enigma
Is it a fairy tale if the poison apple is dipped in cyanide, or does the cyanide make it a spy story? Like the math equations literally hanging over the characters or framing them on translucent legs...
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The Odd Couple
The single most romantic scene this summer theater season is in Mark St. Germain’s Dancing Lessons, currently having its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company. And it’s not the obvious one in...
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Chekhov Chuckles
Christopher Durang’s 2013 Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike does to Anton Chekhov what Durang’s surreal comedy classic The Actor’s Nightmare did to Beckett, Coward, Shakespeare, and Robert Bolt (A...
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Mr. Broadway
The genius of Jim Brochu’s Character Man: A Musical Memoir shows smartly in its simple setting: “Now and Then, Backstage or out front of a theatre.” A concert piano sits upstage right; two red...
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No Blarney
Two wooden chairs flank one wooden table, and a wooden podium stands downstage right. The curved two-story projection screen runs the 40-plus feet wide upstage, a soft green light cast from the top...
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Pure Magic
Spirits haunt Capital Rep’s current production of the Tony Award-winning The Secret Garden, and that’s a good thing. They are not the Ghosts of Xmas Past, Present, and Future, nor is it the...
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Best of Theater 2014
Shakespeare & Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream, photo by Kevin Sprague 1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare & Company Outgoing Artistic Director Tony Simotes ends his reign on a high...
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Winter’s Warm Glow
It takes a lot to entice people out into the brutal Ethan Frome weather we’re having, when the cold winds of New England bite down onto the white bones of its inhabitants. With the snow in Pittsfield...
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The Man Who Came to Dinner
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart were comedic geniuses. Their collaborations may be 80-some-odd years old now, but they still can please an audience. This past fall, their 1937 Pulitzer Prize-winning...
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Home Fires Burning
“Please don’t hurt me,” Child (Roxanne Fay) says periodically to the audience, her head turned aside, not making eye contact. The words slide into her story, almost like a codicil slipped into a...
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War of Words
“Astonishing,” or some variation or the word, is said frequently by the four characters in Butler, a historical comedy set at the beginning of the American Civil War. It’s also an apt word for how an...
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The Dream Comes Alive
This stage picture–smoke and shadows, iron bars, ropes wrapped around 2-foot-thick wooden beams that soar three stories tall lit only from the pale orange glow of lanterns hung from the beams and a...
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Drops of Magic
Owen Smith, producing artistic director, gave the best criticism for Park Playhouse’s 27th annual production, this year’s Singin’ in the Rain, a 1983 musical based on the immortal MGM 1952 film of...
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Crazy Fun
It was a tough off-season at Shakespeare and Company: Tony Simotes, 2014 artistic director and founding member of the troupe, “left” and was soon picked up by the Berkshire Theatre Group; the new...
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Crimes of Nonpassion
Deathtrap on the Fitzpatrick Main Stage of Berkshire Theatre Group in Stockbridge has the feel of classic summer stock theatre. Ira Levin’s 1978 play was well-regarded, it’s light and tight (six...
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