Deep Questions in Hovey’s ‘Jesus Hopped the A Train’

March 13, 2019March 13, 2019 michaelhoban3 Comments

Arthur Williams III as Lucius Jenkins and Bill Stambaugh as Valdez in Hovey’s ‘Jesus Hopped the A Train)

By Deanna Dement Myers

Jesus Hopped the A Train – Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Directed by Haris Lefteri. Co-producers: Mark Stickler and Kristen Dattoli; Monica Bruno, Stage Manager; Michelle Aguillon, Stage Design; Douglas Gordon, Lighting Design; Jason Dawson, Sound Design; Anna Silva, Costume Design. Presented by the Hovey Players March 1-16. Tickets available at hoveyplayers.com

“How many Sons of God you know drive a Lexus?”

Kneeling on stage, a young man attempts to recite the Lord’s Prayer from memory. In a holding cell for twenty-three hours a day, Angel Cruz (Dominic Carter) is awaiting trial for the shooting of the Reverend Kim. The shooting was part of a botched plan to rescue his childhood friend who had been brainwashed and captured by Kim’s cult. Angel is frightened and angered by his incarceration, as this is basically his first criminal offense.

Entropy Theatre Introduces Itself with ‘a grimm thing’

March 13, 2019March 13, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

Review by James Wilkinson

A Grimm Thing – Directed by Joe Juknievich. Lighting Design: Abigail Wang. The ensemble includes: Isabelle Beagen, Dylan Goodman, Ryan Lemay, adian Madhurt Jo Michael Rezes and Kayleigh Kane. Produced by Entropy Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts March 8-10, 2019.

To begin at the beginning. The poster for Entropy Theatre’s premiere production, A Grimm Thing, depicts a young girl crouched on a path, presumably lost somewhere in the woods. The trees around her scale impossibly high, offering no real shade or comfort. If you look a little further down the lane is a squat wooden cabin, beyond that the mist and fog obscure any real indication of where the path we’re following will lead. Fear and dread hang in the air. We’ve entered the world of the Brothers Grimm. If your encounters with the brothers’ tales are limited to the versions produced by the Disney, you’re going to have to reorient yourself. Many of the original stories take a much darker view of the world than the one pushed by Uncle Walt. Here, blood is spilt, danger lurks around every corner and a ‘happily ever after’ is far from guaranteed.

Boston Theater Company’s ‘Move Your Face’ Paints With Broad Strokes

March 12, 2019March 12, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

by Nicholas Whittaker

‘Move Your Face’ directed by Joey Frangieh, Assistant Direction by Amie Lytle. Set Design: Maggie Kiernan. Stage Manager: Audrey Seraphin. Lighting Design: Emily Bearce. Music: Nate Shaffer. Presented by the Boston Theater Company at the Boston Playwright’s Theater, 949 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215.

Move Your Face is an exercise in caricature. It has to be; the play’s motivating conceit demands it. Move Your Face is a “wordless play”. After being fully scripted, each line was removed from the performance. In addition (an apparent paradox with the play’s name), each actor spends the entirety of the play (with one notable exception) wearing a brightly-colored mask. With two of the most important tools in an actor’s toolbox – facial expression or vocal inflection – stripped away, Move Your Face’s cast and creative team has to rely on movement, action, and visual spectacle to make its point. Unfortunately, the end result is a story mostly stripped of nuance and emotional specificity, relying on overly-broad strokes to make its point.

A.R.T. Gives Oxygen to Celine Song’s ‘ENDLINGS’

March 9, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

By Linda Chin

Endlings – Written by Celine Song; Directed by Sammi Cannold; Scenic Design by Jason Sherwood; Costume Design by Linda Cho; Bradley King, Lighting Designer; Sound Design by Elisheba Ittoop. Presented by American Repertory Theater. At Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St. Cambridge through March 17.

Like the Manhattan millennial Ha Young muses in the second act of Endlings, I love theater. After seeing Endlings, by playwright Celine Song, I love theater even more. And as a lifetime theatergoer and arts advocate who is Asian American, I admire the American Repertory Theater (where Endlings runs through March 17) even more than ever. Song wrote an “Asian play” she considered “unproducible” – with extensive technical and casting demands (beach and underwater scenes, talking clams, three elderly Asian actresses who could swim – and spoiler alert – could rap), and an inscrutable title (what exactly are endlings, anyway?). Not only did ART give Endlings its world premiere less than a year after its development during the 2018 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, it was produced with all creative hands on deck. If the response of the audience on opening night (diverse in age, ethnicity, as well as students and long-term subscribers) was any indication, I was not alone in being moved by this work – at times funny, at times painfully poignant, and clever throughout.

In SpeakEasy’s ‘Once’, Impossible Dreams Seem Possible

March 8, 2019March 8, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

(Mackenzie Lesser-Roy as ‘Girl’ and Nile Scott Hawver as ‘Guy’ in SpeakEasy Stage’s ‘Once’ – Photos by Maggie Hall Photography)

By Linda Chin

‘Once’ – Book by Enda Walsh; Music and Lyrics by Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová. Based on the Motion Picture Written and Directed by John Carney. Directed by Paul Melone; Music Direction by Steven Ladd Jones; Choreography by Ilyse Robbins; Scenic Design by Rachel Padula-Shufelt; Lighting Design by Karen Perlow; Sound Design by Andrew Duncan Will. Presented by Speakeasy Stage at the Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St., Boston through April 7

Artists and audiences benefit when theater companies embrace authenticity and relatability as critical components of their mission and values, and plan their seasons accordingly. Bravo to those producers, creative teams and casting directors with bold visions and broad reach and the perseverance to find the best actors for the roles, especially challenging with the specific requirements in musical theater works. Bravo to musicals of this season that were impeccably cast: Miss You Like Hell (Company One & ART), Breath and Imagination (Lyric Stage & Front Porch Arts Collective) and Billy Elliot (Seacoast Rep). To this list we can add SpeakEasy’s Fun Home, which with Scottsboro Boys and Allegiance in previous seasons represent a sweep of standouts with multi-talented (& multicultural & multigenerational) ensembles of actors who speak (and sing and dance) their truth. In Once, the actors are also the musicians for the musical (a first in SpeakEasy’s 27-year history), making impossible dreams – of artists, immigrants, people young and old – seem possible.

Monica Bill Barnes & Company’s ‘Happy Hour’ Comes to Boston – Interview

March 6, 2019March 11, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

(Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass in ‘Happy Hour’)

By Mike Hoban

‘Happy Hour’ – Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston and Monica Bill Barnes & Company, March 12-16, District Hall, 75 Northern Avenue in Boston’s Seaport. All performances at 6 p.m. with a Friday 8:30 PM show added to accommodate additional demand Tickets available at www.celebrityseries.org.

Celebrity Series of Boston will bring back Monica Bill Barnes & Company to Boston with their two-woman dance/comedy piece, Happy Hour, an immersive show that promises to “blend cringe-worthy humor with socially awkward empathy in an after-work get-together.” Part office party, part dance show, and part karaoke event, performers Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, dressed in men’s suits, crash an office party playing two utterly feckless would-be alpha males who attempt to seduce their way through the office happy hour. The performance is preceded by a 30 minute pre-show warmup hosted by Robbie Saenz de Viteri, who serves as MC for the event. Happy Hour features a potpourri of American dance styles – jazz, theater dance, tap and a bit of ballet and modern for good measure – along with a massive dose of broad physical humor. Theater Mirror caught up with Barnes and Saenz de Viteri by phone as they prepared for the upcoming performance March 12-16 at District Hall in the Seaport.

Ancient Eastern Culture Meets Western Theater in A.R.T.’s ‘Endlings’

March 4, 2019March 5, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

Emily Kuroda, Wai Ching Ho, and Jo Yang in A.R.T.’s ‘Endlings’

by Mike Hoban

Endlings – Written by Celine Song; Directed by Sammi Cannold; Scenic Design by Jason Sherwood; Costume Design by Linda Cho; Lighting Design by Bradley King; Sound Design by Elisheba Ittoop. Presented by the American Repertory Theater. At Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St. Cambridge through March 17.

On the surface, Endlings – now being given its world premiere at the A.R.T’s Loeb Center in Cambridge – is about three older women who have spent nearly their entire lives earning a meager existence by diving for seafood from a tiny island off the coast of South Korea. While the subject matter sounds like it would make for an intriguing enough premise on its own, Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song has chosen to expand her darkly comic play to include themes of her own family’s migration to Canada (and eventually New York City) in search of “better real estate”, as well as a wildly comic philosophical discussion of how much one’s ethnic/racial identity should inform their work. Staged on an absolutely gorgeous and cleverly constructed set, the play also smashes the fourth wall to pieces throughout, creating an uneven but highly entertaining and biting comic pastiche.

BIRDY’s Winged Victory

March 1, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

(Spencer Hamp (Young Birdy) and Maxim Chumov (Young Al) in ‘Birdy’ – Photos by Evgenia Eliseeva)

By Beverly Creasey

‘Birdy’ – Adapted by Naomi Wallace from the novel by William Wharton; Directed by Steven Maler; Scenic & Costume Design by Clint Ramos; Lighting Design by Jeff Adelberg; Sound Design by J Hagenbuckle. Presented by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at the Sorenson Center for the Arts, Babson College through March 17

Commonwealth Shakespeare (in residence at Babson College) has assembled an impressive team to animate William Wharton’s allegorical novel, BIRDY (playing through March 17^th). BIRDY has been adapted by playwright Naomi Wallace, whose brilliant ONE FLEA SPARE is fondly remembered by this reviewer. BIRDY is both the play’s title and the nickname of its central character. The touching, and at times humorously ironic, narrative soars alternately from past to present, illustrating the value of friendship and the devastating damage of war.

Is it really the ‘ENDLINGS’?

March 1, 2019March 16, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

By Sheila Barth

BOX INFO: World premiere of Celine Song’s 1-1/2 hour play at American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), appearing through March 27, at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Tickets start at $25. americanrepertorytheater.org

While Celine Song’s new, two-act play is a fascinating foray into the world of little-known Korean women who spend most of their lives – and days – diving daily for seafood, the playwright needs to concentrate more on these women and less on her self-effacing fixation of writing about “white persons“ plays in Act II.

‘BIRDY’ Soars at Carling-Sorenson Theater

March 1, 2019March 16, 2019 michaelhobanLeave a comment

By Sheila Barth

BOX INFO: Naomi Wallace’s adaptation of William Wharton’s novel, “Birdy”. Two-act, two-hour play presented by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, directed by Stephen Maler, March 15,16, at 7:30 p.m.; March 17, at 3 p.m., at Carling-Sorenson Theater, Babson College, 231 Forest St., Babson Park, Wellesley. Contains adult language and brief nudity.

Slim actor Will Taylor perches on a chair, his weight settling on his toes. His head flutters slightly, his arms enfolding himself, like a bird tucking in his wings. Other times, he’s on the floor, waiting, his eyes and head alert, his body quivering. Theatergoers, mesmerized, are also on the stage, nearby, on three sides, seated in two rows at Babson College’s Carling-Sorenson Theater.