Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Mark your calendars
The new seasons for the American Repertory Theatre, Gloucester Stage and Stoneham Theatre
COMPILED BY CAROLYN CLAY

The American Repertory Theatre 2004-2005

The American Repertory Theatre gets more intimate and more international next year with a season that brings both the unveiling of a 300-seat second performing space at Zero Arrow Street and the importation of renowned artists from England, Poland, Hungary, South Africa, Canada, and France. It gets under way November 27 through December 22, when English director Mark Wing-Davey (he helmed last summer’s Henry V in Central Park with Liev Schreiber) takes on Restoration playwright Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife. Vanbrugh was actually a well-known architect who moonlighted as a dramatist, and the 1697 The Provok’d Wife, which is about a wealthy couple endeavoring to spice up their marriage, is considered by some to be his masterpiece.

From the Restoration we go to Cape Town — or Cape Town comes to us — when the ART presents a South African Festival. It kicks off December 30 through January 16 as ART veteran actor Pamela Gien returns with her Obie-winning one-woman memory play The Syringa Tree, which is about her childhood in white South Africa. Playwright, satirist, and drag diva Pieter-Dirk Uys comes to the Loeb January 5 through 23 with an evening titled Foreign Aids in which he plays a variety of characters ranging from Nelson Mandela to Mrs. Evita Bezuidenhout, a woman Uys has turned into "the most famous white woman in South Africa." South African actor John Kani, best known here for indelible performances in the works of Athol Fugard, follows January 21 through 30 in an autobiographical piece called Nothing But the Truth.

Canadian writer, director, and performer Robert Lepage brings his multimedia pageant The Far Side of the Moon, which has been acclaimed around the world, February 5 through 27. Lepage is known for his marriages of poetry and technology; this solo piece "uses incredible visual wizardry to chart the lives of two brothers who find themselves caught up in the wonder of the space race."

We get to put one foot in Elizabethan England and the other in Carthage when English author, translator, and director Neil Bartlett directs Christopher Marlowe’s rarely revived Dido, Queen of Carthage (it was done at London’s Globe in 2003) March 5 through 26. We’re promised "live Baroque music and a lavish physical production," along with the sad spectacle of Trojan hero Aeneas ditching Dido.

ART artistic director Robert Woodruff will initiate the new space at Zero Arrow Street, which the troupe will use in conjunction with developer and human-rights activist Greg Carr, founder of the Market Theater, April 1 through 24. Currently dubbed "The Woodruff Project," the yet-to-be-created work will explore the theatrical possibilities of the space.

Then it’s back to the Loeb and on to Eastern Europe. Hungarian director János Szász, who has helmed eye-opening productions of Mother Courage and Uncle Vanya for the ART, returns to direct Eugene O’Neill’s New England–set Desire Under the Elms May 14 through June 12. Krystian Lupa, an icon of the Polish stage, arrives to take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters June 18 through July 17. The buzz on this is such that the production has already been invited to the Edinburgh Festival.

Not that all will be eggheady in Harvard Square. The ART will precede its heady season with a duet of performances on the Loeb main stage joined by the rubric Summer Fun @ ART. First those physically adroit punsters the Flying Karamazov Brothers come to town July 21 through August 8 in Life: A Guide for the Perplexed (Convention Edition). This newest of the Karamazov guides to juggling life’s vicissitudes is described as "a series of parables designed to help us survive in the modern world." Then September 10 through October 9, the legendary Marcel Marceau and Company will show us how to do so silently in a program titled Les Contes Fantastiques. The first half of this program features the French master of muteness in solo performance; it’s followed by Marceau and Company — artists handpicked and trained by Marceau himself — performing the "fantastic tales" of the title. Oh darn, no Hershey Felder.

Gloucester Stage 2004

Those looking to put some cultural meat into that trip to the beach might be interested in the season that Gloucester Stage Company has just announced. Located across the harbor from Rocky Neck, the theater celebrates its 25th anniversary this summer, getting off to a musical start June 9 through 27 with Marry Me a Little, the 1981 revue by Craig Lucas and Norman Rene built around a trunk of songs by Stephen Sondheim. Using numbers the great one had dropped from various shows for various reasons, the pair constructed a bittersweet saga of two lonely singles on a Saturday night. Here said singles will be portrayed by Leigh Barrett and Drew Poling, whose personalities and tonsils last merged in GSC’s exhilarating last-season revival of Jacques Brel. That’s to be followed June 30 through July 18 by Art author Yasmina Reza’s comedy LifeX3, which looks in on two couples at an awkwardly foodless Paris dinner party. The cast will feature GSC heavy hitters of yesteryear Paul O’Brien and Sandra Shipley.

Artistic director Israel Horovitz feeds his little theater a new play each season; this year it’s the English-language premiere of Compromise, which is described as "a thought-provoking work about a scientist and his cleaning lady, both of whom must face and struggle with a moral dilemma." Michael Morris directs the Horovitz piece, which runs July 21 through August 8. Elliot Norton Award winners Eric Engel and Nancy E. Carroll return to Gloucester August 11 through 29, when Engel will direct Carroll in Rebecca Gilman’s provocative look at racism in academe, Spinning into Butter. Summer ends with The Loman Family Picnic, September 1 through 19. No clambake for the Death of a Salesman clan, it’s Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies’s offbeat account of a family unraveling on 1960s Coney Island. But GSC doesn’t call it quits when summer does: coming October 13 through 31 is Dracula: The Journal of Jonathan Harker, actor/writer Jim Helsinger’s one-man tour-de-force retelling of Bram Stoker’s famed tale of the undead. Put away the sunscreen; get out the garlic.

Stoneham Theatre 2004-2005

Stoneham Theatre has unveiled its 2004-2005 season, which will be capped by the world premiere of artistic director Weylin Symes’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea, March 17 through April 3. First up, though, is a very different kettle of fish: The Who’s Tommy, the granddaddy rock musical that grew out of the 1969 concept album about the pinball wizard with the very nasty childhood. That opens the season September 9 through October 3; it’ll be followed October 28 through November 14 by the New England premiere of Tony winner Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour, which had a 2003 Broadway run starring Robert Sean Leonard. Set in a publishing office in 1919, it revolves around an odd machine that churns out tomorrow’s news.

Every theater’s obligatory cash cow, A Christmas Carol, in an adaptation by producing director Troy Siebels, runs December 2 through 23, On its heels is the New England premiere of John & Jen, a two-character musical by award-winning composer Andrew (The Wild Party) Lippa and librettist Tom Greenwald that travels back to the 1960s to tell the tale of Jen and the two Johns in her life, a younger brother who’s fighting in Vietnam and a son who’s coming of age in the Age of Aquarius. The Old Man and the Sea will be followed May 5 through 22 by the area premiere of Michael Hollinger’s An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Bœuf, a "comic tragedy in seven courses" that explores the connections between food and love. Bringing the season to a snapping close is the Agatha Christie chestnut The Mousetrap June 2 through 19.


Issue Date: April 30 - May 6, 2004
Back to the Editor's Picks table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group