Photo: Craig Bailey, Perspective Photo. Aimee Doherty and Steven Goldstein.

Big Fish now playing at Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion is the third dramatized version of Daniel Wallace’s magical realist novel, all adapted by John August over many years. As a movie, directed by Tim Burton, its whimsy appealed to a certain audience base. August, a playwright as well as a script writer, decided it had the makings of a musical and teamed up with composer Andrew Lippa. Ten years later, Big Fish opened on Broadway to mixed reviews. Critics found it lavish, opulent and, in some cases, overdone. Despite its fans, the production closed within a few months.

August and Lippa’s belief in the show’s possibilities brought them to Boston and SpeakEasy’s artistic director Paul Daigneault, known for his skill with musicals. All three artists were committed to simplifying the show, emphasizing its Alabama roots, deemphasizing the Broadway pizzazz, and making Edward Bloom (Stephen Goldstein) more understandable, and his son Will (Sam Simahk) more sympathetic.

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Photo: Richard Termine. Dominic Marsh (Tristan) and Hannah Vassallo (Yseult).

Although new to Boston, Great Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre Company is over thirty years old. Based in Cornwall, the company, composed of ever-changing international actors, tours widely. Their repertoire tends to showcase works drawn from mythology. Tristan and Yseult, the production currently playing at Boston’s Cutler Majestic is representative of their imagistic style, which frequently features acrobatic movement, live folk music, song, and dance. The work was adapted and directed by Emma Rice.

Kneehigh has updated the medieval romantic tale of Tristan and Yseult by adding vaudeville, musical comedy, and circus techniques. Wagner’s lush music from his 1865 opera often takes a backseat to recorded bluegrass, Latin music, jazz, Carl Off’s “Carmina Burana” and modern pieces such as Nick Cave’s “Sweetheart Come,” as well as Stu Barker’s compositions written especially for the show, played by the company’s four musicians.

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The Central Square Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts has brought in Bedlam’s unusual production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, written in 1923. The New York-based company, now in its second year, has specialized in performing large cast classics in meager spaces with a small number of actors, sparse scenery and minimal technical effects.

Few cuts have been made to the three-hour work written, in Shavian fashion, as a debate in which Joan has the last word. Shaw is true to the well-known tale of the medieval country girl, who by dint of religious belief, patriotism, and love of warfare, almost succeeds in driving the English out of France, is tried by the Inquisition for heresy, and burnt alive. However, his Joan is a female version of Shaw’s übermensch, a person whose superior intellect entitles him/her to lead.

Joan is played by the extraordinary Andrus Nichols, co-founder of the company. Nichols, dressed in plain contemporary clothing in lieu of armor, her hair long, contrary to the script, plays with all facets of Joan’s personality. She is warm, naïve, proud, playful, lucid, brave, as the text would have it. By turns, she elicits laughter and tears.

The twenty-three male roles – soldiers, plain folk, nobles, churchmen – are in the hands of three talented actors, Edmund Lewis, Tom O’Keefe, and actor/director Eric Tucker, the other co-founder. …

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Molly Ivins was a leftist journalist who wrote in and about the politically conservative state of Texas for most of her career. Her brash, biting, mocking, satirical columns ultimately brought her to the attention of American liberal ideologues. With the ascendancy to the oval office of George W. Bush, whom she nicknamed Shrub, Ivins reached the height of her notoriety. Her favorite Texas political chump had become big news.

Now at Boston’s Lyric Stage, the one-woman show, Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, assembled by first- time playwrights Margaret Engel and Allison Engel, is composed of political commentary, biography, and anecdotes. Since much of the material is taken directly from Ivins’ writing, it is generally funny, intelligent, and thought provoking. …

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Photo: A.R. Sinclair

The Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts is currently presenting Arabian Nights as their holiday show, making the festive season more welcoming to all. This universal classic compilation, which has its roots in tales that originated across centuries in Persia, India, and Arabia, among others, is fittingly played by a multi-racial cast. Out of the hundreds, if not a thousand and one stories, adapter Dominic Cooke selected five, two of which, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Sinbad the Sailor” are well known. Familiar character names are somewhat exoticized; Schahrazad instead of Scheherazade, for instance.

Advertised as a family show, it contains sexism, abuse of power, and violence that in 2014 have a disconcerting pertinence to current politics, given recent news accounts of beheadings in Muslim countries. The framing story tells of the King’s vengeance against all women because of his dead wife’s infidelity. Each night, he rapes a virgin and has her beheaded the following morning. In this version, however, Schahrazad volunteers as a victim in the belief – validated in the end – that she will be able to change his thinking through the power of storytelling. She is willing to risk death to be able to save the lives of young women. Her ploy is to entertain the King with tales so that he will spare her to hear another.

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Ed Hoopman and Laura Latreille. Photo: Mark S. Howard 

Sarah Ruhl’s haunting epistolary play Dear Elizabeth, now at Boston’s Lyric Stage, is drawn from poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell’s thirty year correspondence, ended by Lowell’s death. The relationship began in 1947 at a party when they met at an important point in each of their lives. At age thirty, Lowell had won the Pulitzer Prize and the thirty-six year old Bishop’s first book of poems had just been published. They instantly took to one another as fellow poets, although Lowell’s attraction to Bishop was also sexual. A lesbian, Bishop loved him as an irreplaceable friend. Fittingly, the written word was their means of communication. They seldom saw each other; Bishop lived in Brazil with her lover Lota while Lowell resided mostly in the US.

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