Trinity Rep’s “Fairview” Takes an Interactive Look at Race

May 10, 2022May 31, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

Mia Ellis, Aizhaneya Carter, and Jackie Davis in Trinity Rep’s “Fairview”

by Tony Annicone

Trinity Repertory Company’s closing show of their 2021/22 season is “Fairview”, a Pulitzer Prize winning show by Jackie Sibblies Drury. It is about an upper middle class African American family that starts off as a sitcom a la “Good Times”, but then becomes confrontational. The play also turns interactive with a riveting performance by Aizhaneya Carter, who plays the young daughter, Keisha. The play opens with Beverly peeling carrots and humming a song as she prepares a Birthday dinner for her mother. She wants the birthday party to be a success, and waits for Keisha to join in the festivities when she gets home from basketball practice, while her husband, Dayton shows up to help her with the dinner. Her sister Jasmine arrives with the best wine from France and starts to gossip and complain about things. Here are the ingredients for the first part of the show. All seems well with a harried wife, a goofy husband, an exuberant daughter and a snooty sister until voices are heard spouting some unpleasantries during scene 2.

Shall We Cancel A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder? It Appears To Be the Only Civilized Thing to Do.

May 5, 2022May 5, 2022 michaelhoban2 Comments

*Cast of ‘A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder’ at the Lyric Stage. Photos by Mark S. Howard*

by Michael Cox

Times have changed. The theatre, especially, has changed in the past few years. Every theatre company in this city has declared as much.

This musical comedy, the culminating play of Lyric Stage Company’s season, is filled from beginning to end with the most vile and offensive sentiments. Exploitative and entitled characters espouse horrific colonialist ideals – racism, eugenics and open marriages between cousins – while they systematically quell the lower classes, hold back their capacity for progress and curtail their human dignity at every turn. Woke audience members must endure the most appalling rhetoric. The playmakers who have created A Gentleman’s Guide excuse these problematic sentiments by stating that the characters who express these things are murdered in increasingly fiendish ways. And murder can be delightful when it’s the obnoxious, entitled and tone deaf who are murdered.

“Ain’t Misbehavin’” Sets the Joint Jumpin’

May 5, 2022May 5, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

*Sheree Marcelle,* *Jackson Jirard*, *Lovely Hoffman, Christina Jones, and Anthony Pires, Jr. in* *‘Ain’t Misbehavin*‘ at Central Square Theater. *Photos by Nile Scott*

by Michele Markarian

“Ain’t Misbehavin’” – The Fats Waller Musical. Conceived by Richard Maltby Jr. and Murray Horowitz, Musical Adaptations, Orchestrations and Arrangements by Luther Henderson. Directed and Choreographed by Maurice Emmanuel Parent. Co-produced by The Nora@Central Square Theater, The Front Porch Arts Collective, and Greater Boston Stage Company, 450 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, through May 29.

Years ago, for our parents’ 20th wedding anniversary, my siblings and I bought them tickets to see “Ain’t Misbehavin’”. I don’t remember why we picked this particular show, except that they liked musicals and this one was new. They came back from their evening raving about how incredible it was; they talked about it for days. From what I was hearing, it was the music that hooked them, as they didn’t tell us much in the way of the storyline. The memory of their experience stayed with me, for who doesn’t want to be deeply rocked by a musical? After seeing “Ain’t Misbehavin’” for the first time in Central Square, I totally get where they were coming from.

SpeakEasy’s ‘The Inheritance’ is a Beautifully Realized Production of an Ambitious and Imperfect Play

May 3, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

Jared Reinfeldt (left center), Eddie Shields (right center), and members of the cast of SpeakEasy Stage’s ‘The Inheritance’. Photos by Nile Scott Studios.

by Julie-Anne Whitney

‘The Inheritance’ – Written by Matthew López; directed by Paul Daigneault; movement and intimacy direction by Yo-El Cassell; scenic design by Cristina Todesco; costume design by Charles Schoonmaker; lighting design by Karen Perlow; sound design by Dewey Dellay; stage-managed by Thomas M. Kauffman. Produced by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the BCA/Calderwood Pavilion through June 11, 2022.

Matthew López’s Tony Award-winning play, The Inheritance, loosely transposes E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howard’s End, to 21st Century New York where Forster (a closeted gay man all his life) acts as a spiritual guide to a group of young gay men, teaching them the art of effective storytelling. The group then collectively narrates the fictional tale of three generations of gay men from different social and economic backgrounds whose lives become inexplicably linked by way of friendship, betrayal, loss, and love. The story they write follows 50-something billionaire real estate owner Henry and his long-time partner Walter, both of whom become emotionally tied to 35-year-old activist Eric, whose self-destructive playwright boyfriend, Toby, falls for their new actor friend, Adam. Toby ends up befriending and becoming lovers with a lonely 19-year-old sex worker named Leo, who later is saved by Eric’s unwavering kindness.

Theater Mirror Interviews PunkMeTender on Upcoming Solo Show at Pellas Gallery

April 28, 2022April 29, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

by Mike Hoban

Artist PunkMeTender, theParisian-turned-Angeleno whose graphic, raw form of art draws from street art, graffiti, photography, fashion and the female form, will be featured at Pellas Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston. The solo show, called Voyage d’Ulysse, will run from from April 29 – June 18, 2022, exhibiting a variety of pieces from the artist’s repertoire of work, including two of his NFT pieces from his collection of Punk Angels, which combines his signature Butterfly Wings with 480 different intricately hand-drawn traits. Voyage d’Ulysse will also include graphic acrylic pieces on wooden panels, a mixed media piece that uses stretched canvas, and other pieces by PunkMeTender that combine his roots in street art, graffiti, photography, fashion and the female form.

Theater Mirror caught up with PunkMeTender recently as he prepared to bring his show to Boston.

‘The Prom’ at Hanover Theater is a Musical Comedy Blast

April 27, 2022April 28, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

Cast of ‘Prom’ at Hanover Theatre in Worcester

The Prom – Music by Matthew Sklar and lyrics by Chad Beguelin. Book by Bob Martin and Beguelin. Directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw. Scenic design, Scott Pask; costumes, Ann Roth and Matthew Pachtman; lighting, Natasha Katz; sound, Brian Ronan; wigs and hair, Josh Marquette; arrangements and orchestrations, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Larry Hochman and Glen Kelly; music direction, Chris Gurr. Presented at the Hanover Theatre through May 1.

by Mike Hoban

The Prom, now playing at Worcester’s HanoverTheatre through Sunday, is a show that really accentuates the ‘comedy’ in musical comedy. This witty send-up of celebrity activism hits its comic mark far more often than not, as a quartet of chronically self-absorbed Broadway actors try to rehabilitate their reputations by embracing a cause célèbre, with painful but often hilarious results.

“Head Over Heels” at the Umbrella a Wild and Wacky Good Time

April 27, 2022April 27, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

Cast of ‘Head Over Heels’ at the The Umbrella Stage in Concord

by Michele Markarian

“Head Over Heels: The Musical” – Based on “The Arcadia” by Sir Philip Sidney. Conceived and Original Book by James Whitty. Adapted by James Magruder. Produced and directed by Brian Boruta. Music Direction by David Wright. Choreographed by Lara Finn Banister. Presented by The Umbrella Stage Company, 40 Stow Street, Concord, through May 8.

“Arcadian culture has flourished with its adherence to tradition,” boasts King Basilius (Damon Singletary), who runs a tight, patriarchal ship that includes his wife, the Queen Gynecia (Katie Pickett) and two daughters, Philiclea (Temma Beaudreau) and Pamela (Bri Ryder). Pamela is already proving to be a problem, as none of the suitors her parents present to her year after year are to her taste. Younger sister Philiclea is also a problem, having fallen in love with a man beneath her station, a shepherd named Musidorus (John Breen). At the end of his patience, Basilius goes to visit the oracle Pythio (the magnificent Kai Clifton), who gives him four prophesies. Basilius, liking none of them, decides to hide the truth from his wife and daughters, much to the dismay of his manservant Dametas (Robert Saoud). What follows is two hours of light-hearted, gender-bending frivolity as the kingdom’s inhabitants vacate for Bohemia’s gates. With seventeen songs by the Go-Gos, this is an impossible show not to like.

In Huntington’s ‘Our Daughters, Like Pillars’, Family Comes First – at a Price

April 23, 2022April 23, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

Lyndsay Allyn Cox, Arie Thompson and Nikkole Salter in “Our Daughters, Like Pillars” at the Huntington (Photos by T Charles Erickson)

‘Our Daughters, Like Pillars’ – Written by Kirsten Greenidge; directed by Kimberly Senior; set design by Marion Williams; costume design by Sarita Fellows; lighting design by Mary Louise Geiger; sound design and original music by Jane Shaw; wig/hair and makeup design by Tommy Kurzman; stage managed by Kevin Schlagle. Produced by The Huntington Theatre at the Calderwood Pavilion/BCA through May 8, 2022.

by Julieanne Whitney

Our Daughters, Like Pillars is a story about complex family dynamics and the struggle to break free from the roles we are forced into playing within the family unit. Kirsten Greenidge’s new play focuses on a Black family at the center of which are three sisters doing what they can (or must) to hold themselves and each other together.

ArtsEmerson’s ‘Parable’ Brings Light to a Dystopian Future

April 22, 2022April 24, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

Cast of ‘Parable of the Sower’ at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre

‘Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower’ – Created by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon; Co-Directed by Eric Ting & Signe V. Harriday;Music and Lyrics by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon; Music Direction by Toshi Reagon. Choreography by Millicent Johnnie; Scenic Design by Arnulfo Maldonado; Costumes by Dede M. Ayite; Lighting Design by Christopher Kuhl. Presented by ArtsEmerson at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St., Boston through April 24.

by Mike Hoban

As the U.S. and the rest of the world appears headed for a slide into a 21^st century version of the Dark Ages, propelled by corporate greed, a warped interpretation of the Bible and willful neglect of the planet, at least it’s fodder for some terrific music in the form of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The post-apocalyptic sci-fi rock opera returns to the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre after a workshop concert version wowed audiences in 2017, and powered by a luminous cast, the show again delivers sustained brilliant musical moments.

Family Matters in Huntington’s “Our Daughters Like Pillars”

April 22, 2022April 22, 2022 michaelhobanLeave a comment

by Michele Markarian

“Our Daughters Like Pillars” – Written by Kirsten Greenidge. Directed by Kimberly Senior. Presented by The Huntington, Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, 527 Tremont Street, Boston through May 8.

Lavinia Shaw Williams (Nikkole Salter), the oldest sister of a Black family, has organized a week-long stay at an Airbnb in North Conway, New Hampshire, for siblings Octavia (Arie Thompson) and Zelda (Lyndsay Allyn Cox). Their mother, Yvonne (Lizan Mitchell) is there as well; she has been living with Lavinia and Lavinia’s husband, Morris (Postell Pringle). What appears to be a mere vacation is actually part of a larger plan that Lavinia – or Vinny as she’s called – has for her family; to live together forever under one roof. What Vinny hasn’t counted on is Zelda’s arrival with her new self-sustaining tiny house and new boyfriend, Paul (Julian Parker), as well as the arrival of their negligent father’s second wife, Missy Shaw (Cheryl D. Singleton). Family, with all of its flaws, betrayals, loyalties and secrets, are at the heart of the play.