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Take me out
A full plate of theater and dance
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Spring brings the promise of fresh air and flirty dresses, pastel colors and picnics. While that all swirls outdoors, a new crop of productions will be blooming on area stages. Theater companies come into bud with period and modern classics, contemporary politics, and enough music that some of the birds returning from their stint in the South will find tough competition.

When it comes to musicals, it seems the big stages have had their eyes on the movies. If the celluloid version didn’t do it for you, note that The Phantom of the Opera will descend on the Opera House (March 30 through May 8). Two-time Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby will make what’s being billed as her "farewell performance" in Peter Pan; it touches down at the Wang Theatre (March 29 through April 3). And other familiar Disney faces make cameo appearances at the New Repertory Theatre in the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine Into the Woods (April 27 through May 29), a cautionary fable about what happens to all those fairy-tale characters after the happily-ever-after. Lapine collaborates with many musical marvels; his work with William Finn will be on display at the Huntington Theatre Company to the tune of Falsettos (May 20 through June 26), a bittersweet comic saga of a man who leaves his wife and son for another man.

The state of affairs may be a tad frightful for some of the aforementioned fantasy figures, but circumstances are gloomier still for those who dwell on Skid Row, cuddled up to a man-eating plant, in Little Shop of Horrors, which is at the Colonial Theatre (May 3 through 15). In Providence, Trinity Repertory Company offers the world premiere of You Never Know (April 15 through May 22), a musical by Charles Strouse, who won Tonys for his Annie and Bye, Bye Birdie scores. The new musical-within-a musical is set in a ritzy Miami resort in 1948. We meet a womanizing politician, his movie-star wife, and the intrepid composer who would be a Broadway wonder if only he could get his big hit completed.

We travel farther back in time, to 1934 Hollywood, for the New England premiere of Ken Ludwig’s Shakespeare in Hollywood at the Lyric Stage Company (May 6 through June 4). Fantasy, fact, and farce merge in Tinseltown when the filming of Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream falls apart. The leading man is suddenly off the project, but a burst of enchantment makes Oberon and Puck available to play themselves. For Shakespeare minus the modern whimsy, head over the river to Durrell Hall in the Cambridge Family YMCA, where Actors’ Shakespeare Project concludes its inaugural season slaking power thirst while remaining wary of soothsayers in Julius Caesar (May 11 through June 5).

Politically tinged comedy is Gregory Burke’s stock and trade. The Scotsman won acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Fest in 2001 for Gagarin Way, which Súgán Theatre Company brings to these shores for the first time (April 1 through 23). And as the days get longer, the humor gets darker throughout the Boston Center for the Arts, since Burke’s black comedy will run concurrently with Company One’s staging of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Den of Thieves (March 31 through April 23). That one hinges on the moral dilemmas confronted by a recovering shoplifter, her drug-dealing ex, and his topless-dancer girlfriend when they get marooned in a mob boss’s basement.

Repression and the quest for freedom are on Brit playwright Edward Bond’s agenda in Olly’s Prison, which the American Repertory Theatre’s Robert Woodruff directs at the new Zero Arrow Theatre (April 1 through 24). Occupying the ART’s Loeb Drama Center mainstage is Desire Under the Elms (May 14 through June 12); János Szász directs Eugene O’Neill’s seldom-produced, New England–set 1924 drama. Boston Theatre Works and SpeakEasy Stage Company team up at the Calderwood to take a swing at Take Me Out (April 29 through June 4), the Tony-winning Richard Greenberg play that chronicles what happens when a popular ballplayer reveals he’s gay. And while we’re on the sports page: you can test your endurance at the annual 10-hour Boston Theatre Marathon (May 22), which this year moves to the Calderwood.

Athleticism of another sort is on display when Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater arrives for its annual engagement at the Wang (April 19 through 24). The annual "Ten’s the Limit" Boston-based choreographers’ jamboree takes place at Green Street Studios (April 22 and 33). The Bangalore-based Nrityagram Dance Ensemble will perform at Zero Arrow Street Theatre (April 29 through May 1). Tap-dance genius Savion Glover presents the Boston premiere of his new Improvography at the Shubert (May 6 through 8); the Paul Taylor Dance Company will follow there (May 20 through 22). And Boston Ballet closes its season at the Wang with sweet dreams in Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty (May 5 through 15).


Issue Date: March 25 - 31, 2005
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