There’s a danger to hasty reaction. To act on instinct is to perhaps ignore a bigger contextual picture; a gut-reaction, after all, is only as informed as its bearer. Sometimes that initial shock needs to be bottled – fermented within the larger scope of discourse, self-education, and reflection.
To escape the mundanity of our own everyday.
To revel in the ephemerality of storytelling.
To imagine, to empathize, to learn, to transmit.
The reasons we still attend, enjoy, and review theatre are remarkably similar to the those for which we recycle Greek myths, even in a 2020 beyond what our predecessors could have conceptualized. We can attribute this cycle to the comfort of habit, or perhaps, more grandly, to an ideological belief in intergenerational storytelling, regardless of the tellers’ own bittersweet understanding of fate. We, for the most part, know how the myths end: Icarus loses to his pride, Achilles to his brawn, Orpheus to his crippling self-doubt. We also know that a curtain designates onstage space as sacred, that imminent dramatic action is the sensationalized product of artistic collaboration, that seemingly-alive lights have a consciousness somewhere in a small booth in the ether of a given auditorium.
Christmastime in Baltimore calls for afternoons spent immersed in the city’s ever-improving cultural scene, from indie concerts in Fells Point to touring musical theatre at the Hippodrome. This year, Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre contributes to its local theatre scene an excellent take on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, a perhaps-welcome break from more “seasonally-appropriate” onstage fare. Murder on the Orient Express,adapted by Ken Ludwig and efficiently directed by Vincent M. Lancisi, offers to its audiences an aesthetically-gorgeous voyage into snowy Europe, one populated by a cohesive ensemble of could-be murder culprits.
Murder on the Orient Expressis a classic Agatha Christie murder mystery, one helmed by famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Poirot (played by Bruce Randolph Nelson), en route to Paris on the Orient Express, encounters a strange collective of train staff, royalty, aristocrats, and exiles – each with a peculiar connection to the unsolved murder of an American little girl, Daisy Armstrong. Tragedy inevitably strikes aboard the Orient Express, and Poirot must work quickly to uncover the killer of not only his fellow passenger, but young Daisy as well.
The winter holiday season generally brings a Charles Dickens’ play to theatres. At the New Repertory “A Christmas Carol,” the usual piece has been replaced with Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver” adapted from Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” first produced in London in 1960 and regarded as Great Britain’s first modern musical. Michael J. Bobbitt, the company’s new artistic director has a long career of writing for and working with children. Before coming to the Boston area in 2019, he had been the Artistic Director of Adventure Theatre for twelve years. In this capacity, he directed and choreographed as well as writing new works for the company which is located in Glen Echo outside of Washington DC. He also brought his talents to a number of theatres in Washington DC and taught at several colleges. …
Olwen Fouére (foreground) as the Mother in “Blood Wedding”. Photo: Marc Brenner. A Production posted on thetheatretimes.com. Yael Farber is an extraordinarily talented director of South African origin who presented her version of Mies Julie in Montreal in 2014.
Blood Wedding. Federico García Lorca’s rural trilogy, written in the period between 1932 and 1936 as social unrest increasing polarised Spain, canonised him as a dramatist outside his native country. But these three plays—Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba—merging the symbolic, the lyrical, and the realistic often pose significant challenges both to the translator and director in their striking shifts of dramatic register. Blood Wedding, the first of this trio of plays creates a modern Greek tragedy from the 1928 newspaper story of a pair of cousins—here the Bride and Leonardo—eloping on the eve of the bride-to-be’s wedding. First staged in Madrid in 1933, it is a play where the lean storyline and economical writing avoid easy exposition, allowing the narrative’s ambiguities to remain up to the play’s tragic end. …
Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson created Homer’s Coat, a theatre company that explores ancient literature for new plays. Both the well-known actor O’Hare and the director Peterson developed “An Iliad” a work that is based on Homer’s legendary poem of the Trojan War, but cut to 100 minutes of playing time. The title indicates that there are other visions of the tale.
They first brought “An Iliad” to Boston’s ArtsEmerson in 2013 where it was a hit as it had been in New York the previous year. O’Hare and Peterson spent five years developing the play which they then toured across the U.S. Since ArtsEmerson is celebrating its tenth year as a theatre institution its Artistic Director David Dower and its Executive Director David C. Howse decided to bring back five of their most important plays which included “An Iliad” and five new ones. Unfortunately, “An Iliad’s” second stay in Boston was only for four performances. …
‘Admissions’ is the third work of Joshua Harmon to appear at SpeakEasy in Boston’s South End. The earlier ones ‘Bad Jews’ and ‘Significant Other’ were very successful. Having just seen ‘Admissions’ I am prepared to say that it is likely that this third play will also be a winner.
‘Admissions’ is more topical than the other two since it addresses the lack of equal opportunity in American education, a problem that has not been solved for many reasons. Those who suffer most are black people and Hispanics.
Harmon’s play deals with a white family – a father, mother, and teenaged son who believe themselves free of prejudice against minorities of color and Hispanics. Their strongest prejudice, particularly the father’s, is against white men. …
Bedlam Theatre, a New York City Company, was founded in 2012 by the actress Andrus Nichols and the actor/director Eric Tucker. Their first show, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, was performed by four actors in 2015 at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge although it was written for eighteen. As the company has grown larger it has continued reviving Saint Joan and sending it on the road as it does with their other productions.
In 2016, Bedlam returned to Cambridge where they played two renditions of Twelfth Night. Two years later they presented Hamlet at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston with a cast of four. …
El Ciervo encantado (la compania de Nelda Castillo) en el festival de teatro
de la Habana
Viernes 18 de Octubre
7:00 pm
En El Ciervo Encantado
Calle 18 e/t Línea y 11, Vedado
(entradas a la venta desde las 3:00)
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