[Performing Arts]
Pissing on the Wizard
Margaret Hamilton, Idina Menzel, Mabel King, Miss Piggy—they've all smeared the green stuff
[Performing Arts]
Tempest-tost salad
Of all Shakespeare's plays, few are more fun to produce than his dream stories. I'm thinking A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest here specifically; you know, the ones where a couple of wacky mortals
[Performing Arts]
Learn to teaze without the sleaze
Contemporary burlesque strives to emulate what is referred to as "The Golden Age of Burlesque." In truth, this is an era that never really existed at all. Like so many ideal times, it's a combination of myths and facts told and retold until they are a considerable distortion of what really happened. And we wouldn't want our fantasies any other way than a more grandiose and glamourous version of the reality, The Golden Age is the sampling and piecing together of Burlesque from the 1930s through the 50s.
[Performing Arts]
Come for the filicide; stay for the beer
There's been plenty of nudity going around on the stages of Boston these days, but nobody, and I mean nobody, does full frontal like Ryan Landry.
I'll leave that tidbit and move on to the numerous other reasons why the Gold Dust Orphans' Medea is an unmissable performance from 'Landry's band of merry trannies''.
[Performing Arts]
Like water for molasses
Every playwright needs to work his muscles now and again, but that doesn't mean we should have to pay to watch his calisthenics. With A Body of Water, now onstage at the Charlestown Working Theater, Lee Blessing seems to have let a writing exercise unwittingly stumble into a full production.
[Performing Arts]
Watertown theater company valiantly takes on the po-mo king
Staging a Harold Pinter play is a little like choreographing a very intricate waltz without a dance floor—in fact, without any floor at all. Postmodern British playwrights can't be bothered with laying down the bland linoleum tiles of, you know, plot.
[Performing Arts]
Eight-part dance review gives Boston's dance scene full exposure
[Performing Arts]
The driven snow—not so pure
"Punch 'Vixen.' Punch the 'slut'!" Not what you'd expect to hear at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. But this is theater, not real life. I'm sitting in on a rehearsal, and director Jackie Davis is coaching one of her actors on which words in his monologue need amping up.
It's not everyday you see a guy in antlers descanting on sexual assault. All in a day's work for Brett Marks, who portrays Prancer, one of Santa's malcontent sleigh-schleppers in The Eight: Reindeer Monologues.
[Performing Arts]
Big world; small minds
The most terrifying trend in recent fringe theater isn't some new brand of avant-garde frippery -- it's that new plays seem to be aspiring to the mainstream. That way lies death.
11:11's Panoply, now on stage at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre black box, is proof-positive that theater should stick to what theater does best: theater. Brian Tuttle's new play is a poor man's Babel (itself a poor man's Syriana). Beneath a thin veneer of cosmic-interconnectedness mumbo-jumbo, the story is little more than a cheap espionage thriller.
[Performing Arts]
MIT unites to take live-action anime to the people
For all the nerd stereotypes and bookworm images and secret government projects, the student body at MIT can get pretty weird and wild when they want to. This weekend the geek squad dreams the impossible dream: make anime come alive.