Boston Archives - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Yerma: A Play About a Woman’s Desperate Need to Have a Baby

By Jane Baldwin | June 19, 2019

Lorca’s tragedy “Yerma” written in 1934 is rarely performed in the United States, although in Spain where Lorca is considered one of the country’s most important playwrights, his works are frequently played. However, in the last two years in the US there have been at least two important professional productions. The first was a rewritten, updated version developed in England and brought to New York in 2018 where it won over critics and audiences. The second, now playing at Calderwood Pavilion, was developed in Boston at the Huntington Theatre Company and adapted and translated by Melinda Lopez their playwright in residence. On press night Lopez played Dolores since Jacqui Parker the actress who had the role was injured. …

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Hamnet, A Father/Son Play

By Jane Baldwin | September 28, 2018

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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Not by Bread Alone: The Nagala’at Acting Ensemble Company, World’s only Professional Deaf-Blind Theatre Company at ArtsEmerson

By Jane Baldwin | April 8, 2014

Photo: Avshalow Ahraron.

Not by Bread Alone may be the most unusual theatre experience I have ever undergone. It is a devised piece created by the professional director Adina Tal and the blind and deaf members of the Israeli Nalaga’at Acting Ensemble Company, none of whom had ever appeared onstage before undertaking Light Is Heard in Zig Zag, first performed in 2004 after two years of rehearsal. The Nalaga’ at, whose name means Do Touch, is the world’s only professional deaf-blind acting troupe.

Light Is Heard in Zig Zag, attempted to bring the spectators into the performers’ world, i.e., a world of only three senses. The company’s talent and the work’s uniqueness made it a success that prompted the group to develop their second production, Not by Bread Alone. The eleven performers and their director built on the techniques they had acquired during their first undertaking.

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

By Jane Baldwin | May 16, 2013

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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Sugar:Author Robbie McCalauley Traces her Own Life

By Jane Baldwin | January 24, 2012

For a number of years, actress, director, performance artist, teacher, and writer Robbie McCauley has been creating socio-political works, which draw on her family history, as in Indian Blood and the OBIE winner Sally’s Rape. In Sugar McCauley traces her own life, beginning in childhood in a still segregated Georgia. Life revolved around family, community, cooking, eating, and the garden which supplied the family with healthful food. A happy and seemingly fit child, her cuts and bruises healed slowly. She was told that she must “have a little sugar,” code for diabetes.

McCauley tells us: “Sugar is complicated” – and it is in this play. It connects to love, pleasure, illness, pain, suffering, overcoming, and slavery. She wrote Sugar to rid herself of the shame she felt about the stigma of diabetes and to bring attention to the growing problem of the disease in the African American community.

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Mabou Mines’ DollHouse: at the Cutler Majestic in Boston, MA

By Jane Baldwin | November 21, 2011

L.to R. Janet Girardeau, Maude Mitchell

After nine years on the road, Mabou Mines’ DollHouse, conceived and directed by Lee Breuer, arrived in Boston on November 1. The week’s run at the Cutler Majestic brought this marathon tour to an end. As a fan both of Ibsen and cutting edge theatre, I had been looking forward to the event with great anticipation.

For the most part this “concept” version of the play lived up to my expectations. Unlike other stylized Doll Houses, which look for relevance by contemporizing the play – such as German director Thomas Ostermeier’s 2002 production in which the Helmers live in a chic modernist apartment and Dr. Rank suffers from AIDS – the world of Breuer’s Nora is fixed in the late nineteenth century. From her blonde bouffant hairstyle to her blue bustled dress, Nora looks the picture of her time as she munches her macaroons, confides in Kristine Linde, and flirts with Dr. Rank.

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The Infernal Comedy or Confessions of a Serial Killer by ArtsEmerson at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston, MA

By Jane Baldwin | October 4, 2011

John Malkovich, an orchestra, and two lovely sopranos (Sophie Klubmann and Claire Meghnagi) whisked into town, gave two presentations of The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer and left. This strange performance piece – part one-man show, part Baroque concert – has been touring intermittently since 2008, playing one- or two-night stands, mostly in Europe. The ArtsEmerson engagement was Infernal Comedy’s U.S. premiere of the fully staged version.

As the show begins the orchestra is onstage, the conductor Martin Haselböck enters and an overture is played. John Malkovich walks on dressed in a white suit, black polka-dotted shirt, and white shoes. He wears sun glasses and carries a clipboard. At Boston’s Majestic Theatre, the audience responded to his celebrity and charisma with great applause. He was, after all, the reason that most were there.

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