Karen Bovard - Page 5

The Guthrie's well cast, wittily directed, beautifully costumed production of a new adaptation of one of Jane Austen's beloved novels is a delightful concoction, firmly set in period but updated to our time in terms of thematic emphasis. This upbeat show is well worth a visit, even if you are someone who finds the marriage plot kind of a yawner, usually.

Lauren Gunderson is the 8th most produced playwright in the US in the 2015 - 16 theater season, according to AMERICAN THEATRE. Make that 9th, if you count Shakespeare. And part of the reason is her 2013 farce, THE TAMING, which riffs loosely off Shakespeare's famously problematic sex comedy, THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.

A distinguished creative team has hit it big with a rousing, new, heart-warming version of ANASTASIA, premiering currently at the Hartford Stage Company. This show has appeal for romantics and history buffs and musical comedy fans and dance aficionados and features no fewer than four strong female figures for audiences to identify with; in short, it's a potential blockbuster, for all kinds of worthy reasons.

Though it opens with a burst of convivial laughter at a dinner party for two couples who are long-time friends in an upscale New York apartment, Tanya Barfield's THE CALL takes up thorny topical issues around international and cross-racial adoption that are no laughing matter.

HAVING OUR SAY is the theatrical adaptation by Emily Mann of the joint memoir of the same title published in 1993 by Dr. Bessie Delany and Miss Sadie Delany, who were then both over 100 years old. The evening is a delight as well as a fine history lesson. This co-production (with Long Wharf Theater in New Haven) will run in Hartford through April 24.

Laura Eason's contemporary play is more than just an economical choice for small theaters (just two actors) about a hot topic. It asks provocative questions, too: How far to bend toward commercialism, as an ambitious artist with high aspirations? Can two people from different sides of a digital divide build lasting relationship? Can we adopt a performative 'public' identity to get famous and rich without having it sully our actual way of being?

Director Darko Tresnjak directed 24 other Shakespeare productions before mounting his first ROMEO AND JULIET, currently on the boards at Hartford Stage where he is Artistic Director.  His hesitation arose from his belief that, despite the play's popularity, it is a problematic piece by a young playwright.  It's worth the wait.

Let's admit it:  Theater is sanctioned voyeurism, offering us a glimpse into lives we might not otherwise see.  Often the payoff is in empathy, all bound up with the guilty pleasure of sitting in the dark watching other people in conflict.   In BUYER & CELLAR at TheaterWorks in Hartford, empathy takes a dive while the guilty pleasure is juiced up by the addition of celebrity watching-sort of.  

Dan O'Brien's play THE BODY OF AMERICAN turns on a friendship built on a bond of differing traumas.   It's a true story, and an on-going one. We watch two edgy, damaged, highly verbal men trying to understand themselves through the other and forge a friendship without pretense. 

Fast-paced and funny is what the production of TWELFTH NIGHT at UConn's Connecticut Repertory Theater is going for, it seems. The text has been significantly cut so that running time is just barely two hours, and the antic clowning in the show works well. What's missing is the heart, and since this is a play about love-misplaced love, often-that's too bad.

What is Clara of NUTCRACKER fame like as a grownup? Or Tiny Tim, or Charlie Brown, or Cindy Lou Who from HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS? Answers await in Hartford's TheaterWorks basement space, transformed into a cozy but dated local bar on Christmas Eve, in a lonely corner of the cosmos with a street address of 1225.

Hartford Stage's new adaptation of REAR WINDOW is an exercise in style as well as being a significant reworking of a famous story for our time. And it offers a celebrity sighting: Kevin Bacon in the role made famous by Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's thriller, based on the same source material. So the production's been sold out for weeks with only a few seats and standing room being released day by day. Good luck getting in!

How do we costume ourselves for public representation?  For friends and lovers?  What's essential to identity and what can be shed?   Can we take on aspects of cultural heritages other than our own without exploitation? DISGRACED, which won the Pulitzer in 2013, takes up the dynamics of cultural appropriation and the problematics of assimilation that are central to our national character.

The title character of THIRD is male:  Woodson Bull III, called 'Third' for short.  He's a blonde, blue-eyed athlete, with the kind of name that suggests he's a scion of a powerful upper class family-but looks can be deceiving. Unfortunately, the central character in the play, Professor Laurie Jameson, doesn't seem to know that, despite her Harvard/Oxford training in critical thinking.

Hartford, Connecticut's Sonia Plumb Dance Company is celebrating its 25th anniversary season with an ambitious original production:  THE ODYSSEY: AN EPIC DANCE JOURNEY.

At the top of Christopher Shinn's new play at Hartford Stage, AN OPENING IN TIME, the lights never dim to blackout. Instead, they brighten to lead us into a familiar suburban world occupied by a collection of characters whose lives intertwine as they yearn, in varied ways, to love and be loved.

Obie-winning playwright Christopher Shinn grew up in central Connecticut and attended an arts magnet high school in Hartford. He attended Hartford Stage as a teenager, which has since produced his play DYING CITY.  Now 40, he's rehearsing the world premiere of his new play AN OPENING IN TIME at Hartford Stage, while the second production of his play TEDDY FERRARA is rehearsing in London. BroadwayWorld caught him on this side of the Atlantic.

Theater history buffs have two reasons to seek out a production of RED VELVET, Lolita Chakrabarti's historical drama. First, it sketches in part of the true story of the first great black classical actor, Ira Aldridge. Second, it depicts the beginning of the shift from old-fashioned 19th century declamatory acting style to something closer to the naturalism of the 20th century, a naturalism that still dominates today's stages.

Imagine:  you're a peasant woman in 15th century France, and your teenage daughter has taken strange.  It seems she's having visions of St. Catherine, who's instructed her to lead the French army to victory over the invading English. In pants. And armor. Yep:  you call her Joanie, but we know her as Joan of Arc.

TheaterWorks in Hartford is closing out its 29th season with the one-woman talk fest based on one of Hollywood's first female super agents:  Sue Mengers.   "Gossip is mother's milk to me," she says, and, indeed, the performance is an 80 minute dish session without intermission.