William Shakespeare

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Play by play: October 16, 2009

This week's theater listings
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | October 14, 2009

Clever or klepto?

Third examines dogma, preconceptions
A certain branch of modern liberal academia could stand a little likening to Lear, as stubbornly entrenched in its own theories, deconstructions, and Weltanschauungen as it is.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 14, 2009

Play by play: October 9, 2009

Theater listings
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | October 07, 2009

Crossword: ''Four in a row''

Somewhere in there, there's a sequence
Somewhere in there, there's a sequence
By MATT JONES | October 07, 2009

The games people play

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; The Caretaker; Little Black Dress
Who’s afraid of Edward Albee?
By CAROLYN CLAY | October 07, 2009

Play by Play: October 2, 2009

Plays from A to Z
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | September 30, 2009

Best of the Bard

The Gamm’s masterful Much Ado About Nothing
The Comedy of Errors ? Ha. The Merry Wives of Windsor ? Ha; ha.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 30, 2009

Play by Play: September 25, 2009

Plays from A to Z
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | September 22, 2009

Black beauty

Fences, plus The Savannah Disputation and Mister Roberts
August Wilson pioneered a magical realism all his own.
By CAROLYN CLAY | September 22, 2009

Both new and old classics

Life on the boards
The Gamm certainly has come a long way in the quarter-century leading up to this its 25th anniversary season. The evolution of its name alone is quite a trip.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 16, 2009

Brush up your Porter

Kiss Me, Kate at the Lyric
With its supreme Cole Porter score and its robustly entertaining book by Sam and Bella Spewack, the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate is surely one of the half-dozen best Broadway musicals.
By STEVE VINEBERG | September 16, 2009

Catharsis + rebirth

Portland theater's losses and gains since 1999
My own backward gaze over the last decade of local theater only takes in the second half of it, so I've consulted a few veterans.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 16, 2009

Providence Fall Preview Listings 2009

Music, theater, art, festivals and more in the coming months
A page of listings for local music, theater, art, festivals and more this fall.
By PHOENIX STAFF | September 17, 2009

Autumn garden

Fall on Boston boards
It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.
By CAROLYN CLAY | September 14, 2009

Disco ball

The Donkey Show gets its kicks at the ART
C-dust pinch-hits for fairy dust in The Donkey Show , Diane Paulus & Randy Weiner's disco-set riff on A Midsummer Night's Dream . Forget the juice of "a little western flower" with which fairy king Oberon and hench-sprite Puck mix up the libidos of the hormone-drenched characters charging through Shakespeare's Athenian wood.
By CAROLYN CLAY | September 17, 2009

Play by play: September 4, 2009

Plays from A to Z
Boston's weekly theater guide
By JEFFREY GANTZ | September 02, 2009

Back-to-school supplies

What you won't find on your syllabus
After a summer that started with a monsoon and coasted into its final lap with a heat wave, when we talked about Wilco, celebrity deaths, and Shakespeare in the park, when we feared tasers and crime sprees, and we consumed Mexican food and ice cream, we're ready to make the transition into fall.
By DEIRDRE FULTON | August 26, 2009

Play by Play: August 28, 2009

Plays from A to Z
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 26, 2009

Play by play: August 21, 2009

Plays from A to Z
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 18, 2009

Mixed and mismatched

Errors are still comical in the bucket
Oh those Elizabethans, those cutups, those bawdy scamps. If we had only William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors to go by, we'd wonder how the Brits ever built an empire between all the misidentifications and panicked confusions.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 18, 2009

Letters to the Portland Editor: August 21, 2009

Letters to the editor
Regarding Lance Tapley's latest effort on the Maine State Prison Board of Visitors (see "Secret, Unaccountable, and Co-opted," August 14), what he sometimes refers to as advocacy journalism might be more appropriately termed agenda journalism.
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | August 19, 2009

Play by play: August 14, 2009

Plays from A to Z
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 11, 2009

A smooth course

Fenix's breathtaking Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is arguably the Bard's sultriest, silliest, and most gossamer comedy. As such, of course, it is also among the most oft-produced al fresco summer offerings in the whole canon.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 12, 2009

Twin peaks

The Comedy of Errors on Boston Common
The bay of Ephesus laps Collins Avenue in Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's Latin-tinged, frisky if over-frenetic The Comedy of Errors (at the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common through August 16). It is not across sands of subtlety but through a spray of salsa that the perpetrators of this 1930s-South-Beach-set riff on Shakespeare's early comedy pratfall.
By CAROLYN CLAY | August 12, 2009

Shakespeare for dummies

The Bard (abridged) at CTC
No, it's not sponsored by CliffsNotes. But The Complete Works William Shakespeare (Abridged) , as ably demonstrated by the Contemporary Theater Company (through August 14), shows that the bane of phys-ed majors can be more fun than a barrel of bodkins.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 04, 2009

A Danish punk

The Theater at Monmouth's Hamlet
The sad mad Danish prince is probably the most oft-quoted tragic hero in the English language, but he's a lot more than that. He is also, as I was reminded recently by a theater companion encountering him for the first time, pretty exasperating to be around, as well as "kind of a punk."
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 05, 2009

Play by Play: August 7, 2009

Plays from A to Z
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 05, 2009

Local activists crusade to cut circumcisions

Protesting male circumcision
What do William Shakespeare, Don Johnson, Sean Hannity, Redd Foxx, and Ralph Nader have in common with Jenna Jameson flicks and 70 percent of men worldwide? They're all uncut.
By CHRIS FARAONE | July 29, 2009

Gilded stage

Monmouth shifts time with Twelfth Night
In the Theater at Monmouth's Twelfth Night , the Bard's gender-bending foibles play out in a proscenium within a proscenium — or, more strictly speaking, a sound stage within a proscenium:
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | July 29, 2009

Play by play: July 31, 2009

Plays from A to Z
Boston's weekly theater schedule
By JEFFREY GANTZ | July 29, 2009

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