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.”
Barber Shop Chronicles: Man Talk in a Man’s World

Barber Shop Chronicles: Man Talk in a Man’s World

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Barbershop Chronicles   Photo Ryan Hartford

Inua Ellams’ Barber Shop Chronicles, his first full-length play, was a smash-hit when it opened in London in 2017. It was co-commissioned by the National Theatre and Fuel, an organization which works with new artists to present unusual plays that will both appeal to today’s audiences and introduce live theatre to those who have not experienced it.

Ellams who was born in Nigeria and moved to Great Britain as a young boy returned to Africa to research Barber Shop Chronicles. He visited barber shops in Lagos, Nigeria; Kampala, Uganda; Accra, Ghana; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Harare, Zimbabwe recording conversations to help develop his play which deals with black masculinity in today’s world. A barber shop in London, where Ellams resides, appears after each African scene. …

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Breath and Imagination: The Rediscovery of Roland Hayes

Breath and Imagination: The Rediscovery of Roland Hayes

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Photo Marc. S. Howard

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breath and Imagination is a musical, composed and written by Daniel Beaty, largely based on the life of Roland Hayes, the first African American to achieve international fame on the concert stage. Born in Georgia in 1887 on a plantation where his mother had been a slave, he grew up in poverty. After his father’s untimely death, Hayes left school to help support his mother, Angel Mo’ (short for Angel Mother). What set Roland Hayes apart was his beautiful tenor voice. …

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Wet: A dacamented journey: living as an undocumented immigrant.

Wet: A dacamented journey: living as an undocumented immigrant.

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Photo Ray Shaw

Alex Alpharaoh has brought WET: A DACAmented Journey, his moving, comic, and political one-man show, to ArtsEmerson in Boston at the end of his first cross-country tour. This autobiographical piece could not be more timely given the strong animosity against Latinos, particularly the poor, that exists in the Trump administration. The work, directed by Brisa Areli Muños, was first enacted in 2017 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Los Angeles where it was highly successful. The Los Angeles Drama Circle nominated WET for best play and awarded Alpharaoh the prize for best solo performance. …

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Blue Kettle and Here We Go: A First Rate Revival of Two of Caryl Churchill’s Plays

Blue Kettle and Here We Go: A First Rate Revival of Two of Caryl Churchill’s Plays

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            Blue Kettle Photo Evgenia Eliseeva

Here We Go Photo Evgenia Eliseeva

The Boston Commonwealth Shakespeare Company began life as a summer program over twenty years ago when they began performing free outdoor Shakespearean events on the Boston Common. In 2013, the company broadened their productions and extended their season when they were invited to become Babson College’s Theatre in Residence. Under the title Universe Rushing Apart, the company is currently presenting two Caryl Churchill one-acts: Blue Kettle, first performed in 1997 and Here We Go, which débuted at the National Theatre in London in 2015. …

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Fun Home: an extraordinary musical

Fun Home: an extraordinary musical

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Photo  Niles Scott

Fun Home, the multi-Tony award winning musical is making its Boston début at SpeakEasy and a fine show it is. Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s popular graphic chronicle of the same name, the musical whose book and lyrics were written by Lisa Kron and the music composed by Jeanine Tesori tells the story in an unusual and nonlinear way.

The character of Alison is played by three different actresses at three different stages of her life. First we meet the adult 43 year old Alison (Amy Jo Jackson) who is in the throes of writing her autobiography and recalling the events of her life that made her the person she is today. It is those events that create the story. In the opening scene Small Alison (Marissa Simeqi), a girl about eight, sings of her need for her daddy Bruce introducing a life-long frustration. Bruce (Todd Yard), a closeted gay man, spends much of his time restoring houses, particularly his own, to their initial beauty. Alison and her two younger brothers John (Luke Gold) and Christian (Cameron Levesque) are expected to help their father who is often brusque with them. Todd Yard captures Bruce’s narcissism in the song “Not Too Bad.” …

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Measure for Measure : a stunning production

Measure for Measure : a stunning production

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Measure for Measure  Photo Johan Persson

 

Boston’s ArtsEmerson is currently showing Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” directed by the widely acclaimed Declan Donnellan of Cheek by Jowl in collaboration with Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre. The production is unusual not only because it is acted in Russian (with English surtitles) but also by virtue of Donnellan’s blocking where most of the cast of thirteen is onstage much of the time often moving in unison. The actors are wonderfully and truthfully emotive. …

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We will not be silent, a story of Anti-fascist Youth

We will not be silent, a story of Anti-fascist Youth

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We Will Not Be Silent    Photo Andy Brilliant-Brilliant Pictures

David Meyers’ We Will Not Be Silent, now playing at the New Repertory Theatre at the Mosesian Center for the Arts, Boston is a work whose content speaks to today’s audiences in the US. Many believe our democracy is in danger; our country is split, racism and other types of discrimination are widespread. Discussions and books on the rise of Fascism abound.

Most of the play takes place in an interrogation cell in Nazi Germany where Sophie Scholl (Sarah Oakes Muirhead) is being held. It is 1943 and the war is starting to go badly for Hitler. A year earlier Sophie, a religious Christian and student of philosophy at the University of Munich, and her brother Hans (Conor Proft), a medical student at the same university, had founded the White Rose, a small resistance group who believed that if the German people knew the extent of the evil being committed by the Nazis, they would oppose the regime. To enlighten the population, members of the White Rose wrote and secretly distributed anti-war pamphlets. …

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Hamnet, A Father/Son Play

Hamnet, A Father/Son Play

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Hamnet
Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platz. F.I.N.D. 2017 Festival Internationale Neue Dramatik  photo. Gianmarco  Besadola 

Hamnet, the fascinating play, created by Ireland’s Dead Centre, now at ArtsEmerson’s Paramount Theatre in Boston revolves around Shakespeare’s only son. Over the years, scholars have speculated that Hamnet who died at age eleven in 1596 was the inspiration for Hamlet given the similarity of the two names. Many believe, as do playwrights Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, that Shakespeare had no contact with Hamnet. …

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A Second Time Around for “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze.

A Second Time Around for “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze.

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Truth Values, Written and performed by Gioa De Cari
Photo Michael Hoban

Gioa De Cari’s autobiographical one-woman show Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze returned to the Central Square Theatre this September after nine years for a brief run. Although De Cari was a “recovering mathematician” at the time Harvard’s then president Lawrence Summers gave his 2004 speech in which he asserted the reason that fewer women have careers in science and math is the result of innate gender differences, it inspired her to revisit her experience at M.I.T. In 2009, when Truth Values made its début, the reaction to Summers’s speech was still strong. While male chauvinism has not disappeared, today there are considerably more women working in the world of science and math.

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SpeakEasy succeeds with Between Riverside and Crazy

SpeakEasy succeeds with Between Riverside and Crazy

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Photo: Niles Scott Studios
Pops Tyrees Allen
Junior Stewart Evan Smith

 

Stephen Adly Guirigis’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Between Riverside and Crazy now playing at Boston’s SpeakEasy is an extraordinary play, both funny and disturbing, performed by a wonderful cast.

The protagonist is Walter Washington (Tyrees Allen), known as Pops, a black man and former police officer, who was shot eight years earlier when he was out of uniform and in a bar by a white rooky cop. Since then, Pops has been involved in a lawsuit with the city of New York to receive compensation for his injuries. …

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