The world is in crisis. Jagged Little Pill is on it.
Gun violence? “Fear has no place in our schools,” an onstage placard reads. Climate change? Name-checked in another sign. Rape? The musical dramatizes an attack via metaphorical modern dance. Opioid addiction? The show’s matriarch buys and pops down black market Oxycodone, a scene played out forward and in reverse.Continue Reading
CAMBRIDGE, MASS — Six, the pop-concert musical featuring the wives of Henry VIII cracking wise and woeful about their tragic destinies, is an inventive and exuberant take on 16th-century history for the Snapchat generation and beyond.Continue Reading
Sparkling lead performances help make Bay Street Theater’s new Annie Get Your Gun a warm, nostalgic visit to an earlier era.Continue Reading
Three decades after The Phantom first dropped his chandelier in New York and Jean Valjean took up pursuit here, along comes another Paris-based musical spectacle and prospective blockbuster.Continue Reading
Alan Fox’s Safe Space at Bay Street Theater is a provocative exploration of academic freedom in our call-out culture — and a three-character cage match to control the narrative during a campus crisis.Continue Reading
Did he really just say that? And sing that?Continue Reading
Halfway through the first act of Shakespeare in the Park‘s Much Ado About Nothing, I found myself on Danielle Brooks’ lap.Continue Reading
“I always thought that my lot in life was to help people en masse,” pontificates Susan Sarandon as an unbearable community theater diva in Jesse Eisenberg’s half-baked new play, Happy Talk.
“Through my work. People see me on stage. They see the human condition — it filters through me — and maybe they learn a little something about themselves,” Sarandon’s character, Lorraine, says.Continue Reading
LONDON — Man of La Mancha is being revived at the London Coliseum, starring Kelsey Grammer as a blustery Don Quixote. Directed by Lonny Price, with the English National Opera’s 30-piece orchestra, it’s a luscious delight.
For the show — the 1966 Tony Award winner for Best Musical — lyricist Joe Darion and composer Mitch Leigh crafted a perfect score, built on a base of Spanish guitars periodically punctured by explosions of brass.Continue Reading
Students of Rupert Murdoch may wonder why an 88-year-old multi-billionaire would devote his last years to destabilizing democracy, promoting division and thwarting efforts to slow climate change.
“There is no why,” newspaper editor Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller) says early in James Graham’s absorbing Ink, as part of a discussion with the young Murdoch about journalism’s five “W’s.” (Who, What, Where and When are the others.) “Sometimes shit just happens.”
Ever-so-timely, although ripped from headlines a half-century old, Ink chronicles The Sun‘s first year under Murdoch control, 1969-70.Continue Reading
