Just got a promo email from Company One saying there are still tickets available - including $15 student rush tix - for the two final performances of the New England premiere of Annie Baker's "The Flick" at the Modern Theatre downtown, tonight and tomorrow. Baker's play follows the mostly reclining fortunes of three employees of a dying Worcester-area moviehouse, one of the last big screen venues around still using 35mm film. The digital era looms, but the play really foregrounds the fate of three of the theater's employees - twitchy semi-burnout Sam (Alex Pollock), nerdy new hire Avery (Peter Andersen) and lovely but equally troubled projectionist Rose (Brenna Fitzgerald). The audience joins Avery in learning the sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant truths about his coworkers and then himself. The Globe's Don Aucoin liked the play, and so did I (although just about everyone seems to agree that long first act could be trimmed). Extra props (no pun intended) to designer Cristina Todesco for the set (above, with Pollock and Andersen), which is pretty great, down to the grotty projection booth window and the broken ceiling tiles.
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March 14, 2014
August 25, 2012
Zombies donate to fire relief effort
A fire at 95 Columbia St. in Cambridge left a bunch of folks homeless this week, and now the zombies from New Exhibition Room are helping to raise money for the victims.
A few weeks back I wrote a Globe column about New Exhibition Room's "Zombie Double Feature," a darkly comic summer extravaganza of two gore-soaked zombie plays ("Terror at BPT" and "Last Night Cabaret") at Boston Playwrights' Theatre. One of the rotating lineup of musicians in the show was among those left homeless by the fire, and apparently several other artists of various stripes with ties to the troupe are also among the victims. There's a Facebook page for those who want to help them.
But all in-person ticket sales to tonight's 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. "Zombie Double Feature" performances will be donated to the cause, and the zombies will be taking up a collection as well. More details here.
Pictured: Omar Robinson and Greer Rooney with Baby Zombie in "Terror at BPT." Photo courtesy New Exhibtion Room.
August 01, 2012
"Passion Play" around town
Usually the Boston premiere of a Sarah Ruhl play would come from one of our city's established troupes, but this month's "Passion Play" is the work of the Newton-based Circuit Theatre Company, made up of theater students from colleges around the country. “Passion Play” tells the story of three communities producing the Passion: one in Elizabethan England, one in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power, and one in South Dakota in recent years.
My favorite part is that a single actress portrays Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Ronald Reagan. But others may be more intrigued to learn that the cast of 12 will play and sing all of the music and create all of the sound effects for the piece live on stage, which they say is the first time that's been done.
Students from schools like Brown and Johns Hopkins are in the group, as well as a few local high schoolers. This is their third summer, but their first production outside of their base in Newton. The show actually premiered over the weekend at the Davis Square Theatre.
Tickets are $15 for performances tonight through Friday at the YMCA Theatre in Cambridge's Central Square and Aug. 10-11 (the latter a matinee) at the Old South Church’s Gordon Chapel. Prices are $12/$18 for the closing performance, which is at Oberon in Harvard Square on Aug. 12. Tickets and info at www.passionplayboston.com.
January 14, 2012
Eddie Coyle at the end
Only one show left, Sunday at 7:30pm, for "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" at Oberon. I've written about the theatrical adaptation of this Boston crime classic by Bill Doncaster a few times over the past year, including attending its first reading more than a year ago in the back room of the Burren. Thursday night I finally got to see the full version at Oberon - I brought my dad, who took me to the movie back in 1972, and we scarfed beers and burgers over at Charlie's Kitchen first to get in the old-school mood.
The play was everything I expected, with its network of conspiratorial conversations staged all around Oberon and sometimes overlapping as the web of circumstance tightens around the characters. I don't review plays I write about, but this was dark fun. Special nod to Rick Park as the bartender/ex-con Dillon, whose seemingly genial, reasonable exterior is gradually revealed as a disguise. Peter Darrigo is also effectively real as a familiar kind of cranky, self-aggrandizing, working-class Masshole; it's just that Jimmy Scalise's gig involves guns and banks instead of power tools or paint brushes.
I'm still debating the depiction of Coyle himself by Doncaster, director Maria Silvaggi and actor Paulo Branco. Mind you, they deliver on their artistic intent - I'm just not sure I share their interpretation 100%. Sure, the movie's performance by Robert Mitchum gave the character more gravitas than author George V. Higgins may have intended, but the Coyle they give us in the play is a total mook.
Overall, this is a compelling restaging of the tale, and last I heard, there were only a couple of handfuls of tickets left for the final performance, at 866-811-4111 or cluboberon.com.
October 11, 2011
June 23, 2011
Whitey Bulger in jail. Eddie Coyle on stage.
I went to bed early Wednesday night. Before I went downstairs this morning, I picked up my phone to check email and saw a fresh message from playwright Bill Doncaster. “A little overwhelmed by the karma,” he wrote. “When I started this, would never have predicted Higgins' work would be back on the rise, the Bruins would win the cup again, and Whitey would get pinched. A little surreal.”
Wait, what? I read it again to make sure he wasn’t joking, then ran to turn on the TV. Sure enough, a couple of days after the start of a new FBI ad campaign, they’d finally caught Whitey Bulger.
Doncaster wrote a stage adaptation of George V. Higgins’ classic 1972 Boston crime novel, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” which limns the same Irish-and-Italian mob scene where James “Whitey” Bulger ruled before he went on the run 16 years ago.
“I was more shocked than when they got Bin Laden,” Doncaster said by phone later in the day. “I heard his name and thought, they’re not still reporting on that ad campaign are they? And then I heard the word arrest.”
Doncaster’s play was cheered in a staged reading at the Burren in Davis Square last November, with Higgins’ widow in the audience. And he recently announced that a full production of the play will begin performances Dec. 8-Jan. 15 at the ART’s Oberon venue on the edge of Harvard Square. (Doncaster notes that while Bulger was a Southie phenomenon, the fictional Coyle came from Cambridge's Central Square.)
The play is just one sign of a Higgins resurgence, the biggest being that Brad Pitt spent part of the last few months filming an adaptation of “Cogan’s Trade” in (alas) New Orleans. Doncaster is putting together a non-profit to finance his production and will sart raising money sometime next month. You can go to www.thefriendsofeddiecoyle.com and sign up for email updates.
Doncaster and I had already joked recently about the timing of the Bruins championship. One of the best remembered moments in Peter Yates’ acclaimed “Coyle” movie is when Robert Mitchum, as the drunken hood Coyle, cheers on “Number four! Bobby Orr!” The last Bruins’ Stanley Cup triumph was in… 1972. But the Whitey capture takes karma to a new level.
One of the key characters in “Coyle” is Dillon, a felon who is the silent owner of a bar (like Bulger and Triple O’s), a government informant playing both sides of the street (like Bulger) and, it turns out, a killer (like Bulger). Doncaster said that Higgins, although he’d been a federal prosecutor, always maintained that Dillon was an invention and not based on Bulger.
"I get asked about that pretty frequently,” Doncaster said. “With the similarities…it’s easy to jump to that conclusion.”
In Doncaster’s production, Rick Park plays Dillon. I’d recently asked Doncaster to put me in touch with Park on an unrelated matter, and when he emailed me this morning, his original intent was just to make sure I’d heard from Park.
“Very, very strange,” Doncaster said with a laugh.
Not as spooky as the real thing, though. Doncaster met Bulger “for two seconds” back in the 80s. “My girlfriend at the time lived in the neighborhood. Scary guy, even in a brief meeting.”
June 08, 2011
Natasha has her say. So does Natasha. And Natasha.
"The Natasha Plays" at Charlestown Working Theater, tonight through Saturday, comes with an intriguing back story. Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich is still in her early 20s, but has been produced several times in her homeland and Europe. This triptych of monologues by three different Natashas puts a spotlight on the youth of modern Russia, but at the same time it's universal, says Jennifer Johnson, one of CWT's three co-directors. Abandonment and identity, the price of celebrity, the worship of fame ... not so far from the America of reality TV, Lady Gaga and mall culture.
In "Natasha's Dream," the speaker is an orphan (Julia M. Smith, pictured) who attaches herself to an interested journalist with disastrous results. In "I Won," we hear from an upwardly mobile teen (Sarah Lloyd) who's not going to let anything interfere with her chance at fame. And in the short "Epilogue," recently added, another teen (Shannon McPhee) composes a love letter to a pop star.
"Each of the characters is named Natasha, but they are vastly different. The whole idea is that these young Russian women are products of their environment and their upbringing," she said. "It will be interesting to see how audiences correlate the same kind of themes to the American experience."
The actors are current or former masters students in the theater program at Towson University in Maryland, home to the New Russian Drama Project, and the production was developed there with The Center for International Theatre Development. Center director Philip Arnoult was aware of CWT's interest in international projects, and one thing led to another. The production is directed by Stephen Nunns, translated by John Freedman.
Of course, none of this would matter if CWT hadn't also found an audience that shares its interest. The best sign of that may be that CWT sold out three of last week's four performances of "Caesarian Section" by Poland's edgy Teatr Zar. That was a show of movement and meaning, but not especially linear. Johnson says "The Natasha Plays" is text-based narrative, more traditional in form. Despite the distance between Boston and these teenagers' lives, it should be quite accessible.
"Tons of people came to see Zar, they were very, very exciting events, made more exciting by the tornado on Wednesday night, which was their closing night. It was so crazy," Johnson said. "Weirdly and inexplicably our lights flickered...but it sort of went with the performance.
"The audience at CWT typically stays (after shows), we really try to make it an opportunity for people to talk to each other and the artists, particularly if we have artists from other countries," she said. "But it was such crazy weather, basically no one could leave. So we just were there forever, but we had a lot of wine, so that was OK."
Now that's my kind of theater.
"The Natasha Plays" runs tonight through Saturday at Charlestown Working Theater, 442 Bunker Hill Street, Charlestown. It's accessible by the Orange Line from Sullivan Station or Bus Lines #92 and #93. Tix are $10 tonight, $15-22 the rest of the week. Call 866-811-4111 or click to www.charlestownworkingtheater.org.
Photo: Jay Herzog.
May 16, 2011
Ryan Landry gives "Psycho" mom her closeup
Ryan Landry turned "Psycho" inside out at the Emerging America festival this weekend. The premiere of Landry's one-act "Psyched" gave us Larry Coen in a bravura turn as Norma Bates, Norman's mommy not-so-dearest. Landry's version of the twisted tale, directed by Caitlin Lowans, tells how things got to be so darn dysfunctional in that big spooky house overlooking the Bates Motel.
I guess I have to say spoiler alert, but just about everyone knows the story of Alfred Hitchcock's indelibly brilliant movie (based on Robert Bloch's book) - how Norman kept his dead mom alive in half of his shattered mind, and how "she" drove him to kill wearing a housedress and wig. "Psyched" is the prequel, I guess, but Hitchcock's tale comes to seem just a coda to the Grand Guignol back story that Landry has concocted. Norma is more interesting; poor, pent-up Norman just got more press.
We learn of mom's troubled midwestern beginnings and her tawdry welcome as yet another pilgrim to not-so-glamorous Los Angeles. An unplanned pregnancy and a desperate job search follow, and then she lands a gig doing makeup for the dead at the rural Bates Funeral Home. Then things get really weird. And bloody. Of course, this being Landry, perversity and hilarity go skipping along hand in hand (or hand up skirt, more likely).
The audience for the first of two sold-out shows in tiny Deane Rehearsal Hall (in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts) was packed with local theater names, including John Kuntz, Kerry Dowling and Spiro Veloudos. The phrase I kept overhearing after the show was "Larry was on." Coen, who frequently appears with Landry's Gold Dust Orphans troupe, was indeed a wonder as the matronly Norma, whose violent urges seemed less outrageous than her enormous self-centeredness. Amidst all the insanity and smutty one-liners, Coen let us see the wounded soul inside. The nude scene was pretty good too. Uh huh, that's right.
The second cast member of the cast of two was Jonathan Popp, who played Norman and various other characters. For much of the play, he was kept busy as the mechanism of Landry's Rube Goldberg-ian comic contraption, running out one door as one character and coming in another door as someone else, then lunging for the microphone to provide the voice of Norman's nasty dead grandmother in one of Norma's hallucinations. As Norman grew, Popp got to stretch out a little more. But with his fine deadpan and physical comedy skills, I kept thinking that he'd be a natural for one of those three-actors-play-86-roles shows that are now hot, like the also-Hitchcock-related "39 Steps."
The Orphans' ingenious low-budget gonzo aesthetic was on full display here, even though the show was presented by the Huntington Theatre Company, where Landry is a playwriting fellow. Aside from Coen's lovely dress, the production design included backlit scrims, a can of (cream of mushroom?) soup and hanging corpses made of bubblewrap and duct tape. At one stabby juncture, the audience got spritzed with blood (water), eliciting a couple of cheerful shrieks in the darkness. The fourth wall was not just broken but violated repeatedly thoughout.
The Huntington is one of three Emerging America organizers, along with the ICA and the A.R.T. It's not optimal to give a real review to a show in its very first performance of any kind, but here's hoping they continue to develop "Psyched." Landry has tackled Hitchcock before (his "Gulls" translated "The Birds" to Provincetown), but "Psyched" turned the dials a notch in a different direction. It's worth going further, as long as Coen is willing to wear that dress again. No knock on Popp, but in the unlikely event someone can convince Landry that less is more, I could see "Psyched" as a one-man show.
Photo: Larry Coen in "Psyched." Photo by Paul Cantillon.
March 08, 2011
Boyle's Frankenstein at the Coolidge, live from London
A couple of years ago the Globe sent me off to see a movie about the Mumbai slums with a cast of mostly unknowns. Truthfully I expected it to be an "eat your vegetables" cinematic experience, but as you've probably guessed, the movie was "Slumdog Millionaire," the eventual Oscar winner for best picture. I fell completely under its spell at the screening and went off happily to interview director Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting," "28 Days") at the Ritz afterward. His enthusiasm for India was contagious, and I got to write about "the mingled scents of saffron and sewage," in my story. So I would pretty much follow him anywhere.
Boyle's "127 Hours" is in theaters now, with sleepy-eyed Oscar host James Franco. But another interesting Boyle project that will be on view at the Coolidge Corner Theatre twice in the coming weeks. Boyle is directing a buzzed-about London stage version of "Frankenstein," with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating the roles of Victor Frankenstein and his creation. And two performances of "Frankenstein" will show live in high-definition at the Coolidge, allowing you to have your choice of monsters.
The 7 p.m. telecasts on March 17 (with Miller as Frankenstein and Cumberbatch as the Creature) and April 4 (the other way around, as pictured) are part of the popular NT Live series at the Coolidge featuring National Theatre productions from London. They've pretty much sold out since the opener last season, "Phèdre" with Helen Mirren. So get your $20 tix in advance if you can, at www.coolidge.org/ntlive or the box office.
October 28, 2010
First Night adds Symphony Hall, college venues
Movin' on up! First Night adds three new spaces to its schedule this year. No performers have been announced yet, but First Night has added Symphony Hall and two new renovated venues downtown, Suffolk University's Modern Theatre and Emerson College's Paramount Mainstage. It won't be the Pops at Symphony Hall; word is something very cool is in the works. In addition, First Night's New Year's Eve festivities will return to the Berklee Performance Center, which will once again host an alumni concert broadcast by WGBH and NPR's national "Talk of the Nation" show. This year's First Night button, by painter Scott Listfield of Somerville, will be unveiled in mid-November. All First Night outdoor events are free, but the $18 button is the ticket for admission to all indoor events. Buttons will be available after Thanksgiving.