Winter's revels

Dance and theater to warm the boards

by Carolyn Clay and Jeffrey Gantz

Soon The Nutcracker will be no more than a vision of Sugar Plum Fairies dancing in our heads. Scrooge will have bahed his last humbug. The Revels, as Prospero says, will have ended. So what's a dance-and-theater junkie to do? Fear not, there are post-holiday treats in store, including:

Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Lyric Stage, January 3 through February 2). What better antidote to all that holiday cheer than black farceur Joe Orton's first success, a perverse, Pinteresque ditty about a sexually harassed young lodger who happens to be a murderer? Robert Bouffier directs a cast that includes Paula Plum, Michael Balcanoff, Liam Sullivan, and Michael Bradshaw.

Why We Have a Body (Coyote Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, January 9 through February 2). Claire Chafee's comedy about a female private eye and "the mess we make of our lives" was a hit at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. The New England premiere is directed by Emerson and Company of Women honcho Maureen Shea.

The Glass Menagerie (Huntington Theatre Company, January 10 through February 9). The Tennessee Williams classic gets its first major professional staging in Boston since 1964, in a production helmed by To Kill a Mockingbird director Charles Towers. The cast includes Garret Dillahunt, Jennifer Harmon, Kate Goehring, and Rick Holmes.

Barrymore (Colonial Theatre, January 21 through 27). Tony winner Christopher Plummer is directed by Tony winner Gene Saks in this play about the great, if soused, John Barrymore. The show, written by Belle of Amherst author William Luce, premiered at last summer's Stratford Festival and is on its way to Broadway.

Bed and Sofa (Nora Theatre Company at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, in repertory with Wallace Shawn's The Fever January 23 through March 2). The Obie- and Drama Desk Award-winning musical by Polly Pen and Laurence Klavan gets its New England premiere. The highly original, through-sung piece, which takes off from Moscow in 1926, "combines sexual politics and social satire in a luscious hybrid of silent movies, opera, and musical theater."

Scenes from an Execution (Unseen Theatre at Harvard's Adams House Pool Theatre, January 30 through February 16). The Boston premiere of a work by controversial English playwright Howard Barker. The plot description runs: "Venice's most brilliant painter, Galactia, has been commissioned by the government to paint her greatest masterpiece, a 1000-square-foot canvas depicting the nation's most glorious battle. As the brutal realism of her creation proves shocking and unbearable, she learns the terrible cost of speaking the truth." Art, censorship, and politics before the NEA.

Woyzeck, in repertory with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (American Repertory Theatre, January 31 through March 22). A double dip of German modernism is provided by this provocative pairing. Marcus Stern, who has helmed several otherworldly ART outings, directs Thomas Derrah in the title role of Georg Büchner's seminal 1836 work depicting love and murder in an irrational, burned-out world; the ART promises a production "at once tragic, goofy, sexy, and heartbreaking." Meanwhile, composer John Moran and director Bob McGrath collaborate on a world-premiere theater piece "in response to the 1919 German silent-film classic." A work of "Grand Guignol multimedia music theater," it combines live action with slides, film, and a computer-generated soundscape.

Party Poopers (SpeakEasy Stage Company, February 6 through 22). A new compilation of the crazed, written and performed by John Kuntz, whose Freaks! was a sleeper hit of last season.

Blues for an Alabama Sky. (Huntington Theatre Company, March 7 through April 6). Boston Theatre Award winner Kenny Leon (for his production of A Raisin in the Sun) stages Pearl Cleage's Harlem Renaissance-set work about five friends whose "individual stories create a song of intense feelings and sultry rhythms."

On the dance front. Next month will bring us two of the hottest shows ever to hit the Wang Center. Riverdance, which began as an intermission act at the Eurovision Song Contest and grew into the Irish international stepdancing sensation, sold out Radio City for months; it'll be here for 21 performances, January 10 through 26. Then you'll have a few days to rest up before Boston Ballet's Onegin opens, on January 30. The John Cranko ballet based on Pushkin's great poem might just be the best production Boston Ballet has ever given us; it runs through February 16.