Author: Jane Baldwin

Jane Baldwin, a longtime faculty member of the Boston Conservatory, taught Modern Drama, Acting, and Humanities. She is a recipient of the Canadian Heather McCallum Award for the best English essay and the French language Prix André G. Bourassa. Her books and articles include Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor (Greenwood Press), Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style and Other Writings, which she edited (Routledge Press), and Vie et morts de la création collective/Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation, co-edited with Jean-Marc Larrue and Christiane Page (Vox Theatri). Her essay, “Michel Saint-Denis: Training the Complete Actor,” is published in Actor Training, ed., Alison Hodge (Routledge Press). Her latest work, “The Accidental Rebirth of Collective Creation: Jacques Copeau, Michel Saint-Denis, Léon Chancerel, and Improvised Theatre” appears in Toward a New History of Collective Creation, eds., Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit (Palgrave). Although most of her reviews are from the Boston area, she has followed the Stratford Festival in Canada for many years.”
MIes Julie at the Boston ArtsEmerson: Passion, Violence and Love in Post-Apartheid South Africa

MIes Julie at the Boston ArtsEmerson: Passion, Violence and Love in Post-Apartheid South Africa

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Photo by Roger Bosch. Bongile Mantsai as John and Hilda Cronje as Mies Julie

Mies Julie, director and playwright Yaël Farber’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, is a striking piece of theatre, which retains the basic plot, principal characters, and many of the ideas of the original, while transposing it to a very different world. Strindberg’s nineteenth-century Miss Julie takes place on a Swedish estate on Midsummer Eve, a time of unbridled fun, one which creates a space for the brief affair between Julie and the valet Jean.

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After Sixty Years Fresh as Ever: Waiting for Godot at Boston’s Arts Emerson

After Sixty Years Fresh as Ever: Waiting for Godot at Boston’s Arts Emerson

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Waiting for Godot
Gary Lydon and Conor Lovett in Waiting for Godot.
Photo by Ros Kavanag.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered sixty years ago as En attendant Godot in a small, run-down theater in Paris. Despite the play’s lack of traditional structure – exposition, story development, action, climax, and dénouement – opening night reviews were enthusiastic and the production ran for a hundred performances. Beckett translated and adapted it into English, Irish English at that, as a hearing of the excellent Gare St Lazare Ireland and Dublin Theatre Festival co-production at Boston’s Paramount Theatre demonstrates.

The two tramps who wait endlessly still fascinate. Loneliness, craving meaning in a meaningless world, savagery, longing for ways to make time pass faster remain part of the human condition. Director Judy Hegarty Lovett’s version is less vaudevillian than is often the case. Although Vladimir (Conor Lovett) and Estragon (Gary Lydon) wear the hats of English music hall and go by the clown nicknames, Didi and Gogo, given them by Beckett, there is a realistic element to their acting that is very moving. …

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Kiss and Cry: Tour de Force at Boston’s ArtsEmerson

Kiss and Cry: Tour de Force at Boston’s ArtsEmerson

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kissandcry

Photo: Maarten Vander Abeele

ArtsEmerson recently hosted Kiss and Cry, an extraordinary intermedial production, which blends dance, puppetry, cinema, poetry, the recorded voice, and music – the whole in miniature. A Belgian collective creation, it is the brain child of dancer/choreographer Michèle Anne de Mey and her husband, cinema director Jaco Van Dormael, and developed in collaboration with the set designer, cameraman, image designer, and dancer Grégory Grosjean. Thomas Gunzig wrote the beautiful French script, here translated into English with the voiceover narration performed by Toby Regbo. His melodious voice suits the nostalgic quality of the fantastical love affair that he recounts.

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All the Way falls short at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre

All the Way falls short at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre

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Bryon Cranston. Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva

All the Way, currently playing at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre (ART), was originally produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of its project to explore U.S. history. “American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle,” is commissioning up to thirty-seven new plays of differing styles and genres that tackle significant moments of political and/or social change. Thirty-seven, the number of Shakespeare’s plays, alludes to the kind of characters the Festival hopes the project will create.

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Tribes at Boston’s SpeakEasy: Thought Provoking Play Packs Emotional Wallop

Tribes at Boston’s SpeakEasy: Thought Provoking Play Packs Emotional Wallop

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doubletribesGetAttachment.aspx Photo: Craig Bailey. Erika Spyres and James Caverly.

Nina Raine’s Tribes, currently playing at Boston’s SpeakEasy Theatre, is a powerful drama whose plot revolves around Billy (James Caverly), a deaf young man whose dysfunctional family is in denial about his deafness. Under the guise of helping Billy experience a richer life, his overbearing father (Patrick Shea) discouraged him from learning sign language. The scheme backfires with Billy living on the fringes, even in his own home, unable to fully comprehend what is going on, despite his ability to lip read.

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One Man, Two Guvnors: British Farce Lumbers onto Lyric Stage.

One Man, Two Guvnors: British Farce Lumbers onto Lyric Stage.

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Aimee Doherty, Neil A. Casey. One Man, Two Guvnors. photo by Mark S. Howard.

Photo: Mark S. Howard

Boston’s Lyric Stage opened its fortieth season with One Man, Two Guvnors, the 2011 British adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century A Servant of Two Masters. Like Goldoni’s play, which contemporized the commedia dell’arte, writer Richard Bean and composer-lyricist Grant Olding updated Servant of Two Masters to 1963 when the working-class Beatles were gaining world-wide popularity as class discrimination flourished in the UK.

While the basic plot and characters of One Man, Two Guvnors stick fairly close to Goldoni’s convoluted scenario, the comedy finds some of its cultural roots in the English music hall. This is particularly notable in the appearance of Francis, the comic servant (Neal A. Casey), dressed in the kind of natty, yet tacky outfit worn by British music hall comics.

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The Theatrical Journey of Henry Shikongo

The Theatrical Journey of Henry Shikongo

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Henry Shikongo

Photo by Andrew Alexander

By Jane Baldwin

On May 24, I attended the première of The Boston Abolitionists Project at the Loeb Theatre in Cambridge, MA. This performance is one of several combined theatrical and scholarly undertakings, commissioned by the Civil War Project to observe the 150th anniversary of that singular event in U.S. history. It was also the final production of the graduating class of the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. Among the many talented students was Ottawa’s Henry Shikongo, remembered for his roles in, among others, the musical Blood Brothers and the poetic Under Milk Wood, the latter an award-winning production shown at the Shenkman Centre in Orleans.

In The Boston Abolitionists, a devised piece, created by the graduating students and director Steven Bogart, Shikongo played two major roles: Jonathan, a fictional character and the historical Anthony Burns, a runaway slave, captured, tried, convicted, and returned to Virginia under the infamous Fugitive Slave Act. Both had distinct personalities and mannerisms. Anthony Burns, depressed, frightened, angry, and largely silent was particularly notable for Shikongo’s physicality, a distinguishing feature of his Ottawa stage appearances as well.

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Ups and Downs “In the Heights” at the Boston Centre for the Arts

Ups and Downs “In the Heights” at the Boston Centre for the Arts

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Diego Klock-Perez and Cast 2

Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo  “In the Heights”

In the Heights, the 2010 Tony award winner, is a feel-good, much loved musical about the trials, tribulations, and joys of a group of Latinos living in a barrio in New York City’s Washington Heights. The show’s optimism would seem, at least in part, the product of composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda’s youth when he first conceived it as a student at Wesleyan College in 1999. He wanted to develop a musical about the Hispanic community where he had grown up, drawing on Latin and contemporary musical influences. Unlike the earlier Latino-themed musicals West Side Story and The Capeman, In the Heights is devoid of gang violence. Violence has been replaced by solidarity. While Miranda’s decision to break with clichés is laudable, the result, in this case, is a lack of dramatic conflict and sentimentally drawn characters.

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The Trojan Women. The formality of the play lent itself beautifully to Anne Bogart’s Vision of Euripides.

The Trojan Women. The formality of the play lent itself beautifully to Anne Bogart’s Vision of Euripides.

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TrojanWomen_Akiko Aizawa, Ellen Warren, Makela Spielman_2

Akiko Aizawa, Ellen Lauren, Makela Spielman

Photo: Craig Schwerz

On the afternoon of April 15, the Siti Company was en route to Boston to enact The Trojan Women (After Euripides) when they heard the news of the bombing at the finishing line of the Marathon. Despite their horror and ambivalence about playing under the circumstances, they decided that as actors, their responsibility was to perform. And indeed, the convergence between the devastation of the city of Troy onstage and the explosions at Copley Square in the city of Boston brought a deeper and more personal meaning to the play, certainly to this member of the audience.

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Neva: A Confluence of Theatre and Revolution

Neva: A Confluence of Theatre and Revolution

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Photo. Carole Rosegg.

Neva, Guillermo Calderón’s tribute to Anton Chekhov, takes place in a theatre in Saint Petersburg on January 22, 1905, known to Russian history as Bloody Sunday, the catalyst for the Revolution of 1905. On that day, striking workers marched to the Tsar’s palace to present a petition and were fired upon by armed guards. Thousands died. The title refers to the river which runs through Saint Petersburg, the site of numerous violent historical events, including Bloody Sunday. Theatre and revolution are the focus of the play.

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