Tag Archive: review

‘Freud’s Last Session’ both engages and entertains

WATERTOWN — Playwrights have often found fertile ground in suggesting meetings between icons that never actually happened. There was the successful pairing of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso in Steve Martin’s “Picasso at… Continue reading

Passion, pride bring revolution in Cuba to life

BOSTON – The distance between Cuba and the United States is about 90 miles, but when you are a refugee adrift in the treacherous ocean waters between the two countries, it might as… Continue reading

MRT’s ‘Home of the Brave’ veers off the rails

LOWELL – Sean Daniels, the first-year artistic director of the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, has made premiering new works a raison d’etre for the theater. But new works are like Forrest Gump’s box of… Continue reading

‘Historia de Amor’ is both beautiful and ugly

BOSTON – How can something be both simultaneously beautiful and ugly? It’s when the beauty of a new theatrical technique that seamlessly combines film and animation with live acting is contrasted against the… Continue reading

Lyric’s ‘Mr. Burns’: Discomfort without the payoff

BOSTON – Just for the record, I’m a huge fan of “The Simpsons.” The animated comedy has skillfully skewered virtually every aspect of American culture for more than a quarter-century and earned an… Continue reading

ASP cast delivers a delicious ‘School for Scandal’

CAMBRIDGE – The Actors Shakespeare Project has had a strong record when it chooses to detour from The Bard’s canon, with critically-acclaimed productions such as Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” in 2014, the award-winning… Continue reading

‘Wizard of Oz’ reboot a treat for the eye and ears

BOSTON – It takes a lot to grab and keep a child’s interest these days. I guess that goes for adults, too. And if you are adapting and restaging an iconic work of… Continue reading

Science and sex are partners in Nora’s ‘Acadia’

CAMBRIDGE – Looking back on events that happened more than 180 years ago and reconstructing them is a bit like solving one of those huge jigsaw puzzles. It’s easy filling in those big… Continue reading

‘An Octoroon’: A new take on mixed-race melodrama

BOSTON – An octoroon , by definition, is someone with one-eighth black blood, an amount that still made it illegal for the person to marry a white person in the South before the… Continue reading

Goodbye, Columbus: Those wacky, wild Spaniards

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – As historical figures, both Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella have been in sore need of some PR repair after the full extent of what really happened more than five centuries… Continue reading