Nancy Grossman - Page 2

New Repertory Theatre dusts off an old chestnut for a family-friendly, non-holiday, crowd-pleasing offering as their gift for the season. Lionel Bart's OLIVER!, based on Charles Dickens' novel OLIVER TWIST, is known to be a little dark, with its themes of orphans, child exploitation, and vast income inequality (sound familiar?), but in the hands of New Rep's new Artistic Director, Michael J. Bobbitt, the darkness is lightened up with jaunty performances, a smattering of silly antics, and a set design (Luciana Stecconi) that skews to the cartoonish. With almost a dozen capable adults anchoring the cast, the seven children of all ages are given free rein to behave like children, albeit amazingly talented and spirited ones.

As the year winds to a close, and the holiday hustle and bustle keeps us spinning our wheels, it can be a salve for the spirit and rest for the weary to sit in a darkened theater for a couple of hours. There is a plethora of seasonal fare competing for your entertainment dollars, but may I suggest something completely different from the colorful, holly jolly? A departure from the ballerinas, Christmas ghosts, and department store Santas? How about a two-time Tony Award-winning musical (1999 Best Book/Best Score) written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Alfred Uhry (DRIVING MISS DAISY) and Tony Award-winner Jason Robert Brown (SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD, THE LAST FIVE YEARS), that will pump the blood to your heart, and push you back in your seat until the very end, when you will rise up and salute this Moonbox Productions' PARADE.

The much-anticipated MOBY DICK (A Musical Reckoning), from the team that brought you NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 in 2015, has finally surfaced at the Loeb Drama Center of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. Based on the iconic American novel by Herman Melville, the three-and-a-half-hour-long musical endeavors to theatricalize about 40 of the book's 135 chapters, taking a much larger bite from the source material than the mere 70- page section of Leo Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE adapted for THE GREAT COMET. Oh, would that Dave Malloy (music, book, lyrics, and orchestrations) and Rachel Chavkin (director, co-developer) had approached this project with such surgical skill, rather than casting the broadest of nets upon the waters.

There's not a Christmas tree in sight, but there's plenty of uplifting, feel good spirit in the Umbrella Stage Company's TUCK EVERLASTING, the third production of their inaugural season in their gleaming new building in Concord. Under the direction of Elliot Norton Award-winner Nancy Curran Willis, the simplicity and magic of the story shine through the captivating performance of Madi Shaer as 11-year old Winnie Foster, a girl whose life is inexorably changed when she runs away and meets the Tuck family in the woods of Treegap, New Hampshire.

Space, the final frontier, has finally been explored by Ryan Landry and the Gold Dust Orphans, and their little dog, too. Following the trail blazed by her predecessor, the late, beloved Rhoda the dog, Dolly the Mustache Pup has a featured spot in CHRISTMAS ON URANUS as one of the flying dogs of Pluto. She joins a cast of fifteen humans, many of them veteran Orphans, as they blast off on their mission to rescue Santa Claus from alien kidnappers and save Christmas. It is up to the Robinson Family from a?oeLost In Spacea?? to track down Saint Nick and return him to Earth in time to make his rounds and bring happiness to children across the world.

DOLLY PARTON'S SMOKY MOUNTAIN CHRISTMAS CAROL delivers on the simplicity of its message of faith, family, and love, especially during the holiday season, and is a reflection of the heritage and values of its namesake. On opening night, the acclaimed country singer-songwriter surprised and delighted the audience by making an appearance onstage before the show, but the main event couldn't compete with Dolly's star wattage.

Merrimack Repertory Theatre presents the second installment of what will become a trilogy co-written by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, about the close-knit sisters from Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Paralleling the upstairs Christmas-time festivities featured in last year's MISS BENNET: CHRISTMAS AT PEMBERLEY at Pemberley Estate, the lives, loves, and intrigues of the downstairs denizens take center stage in THE WICKHAMS: CHRISTMAS AT PEMBERLEY. Mr. Darcy, lord of the manor, his wife Lizzy, and her sister Lydia are all back to link the two worlds, and they are joined by Lydia's roguish husband, George Wickham, and three of the hard-working house staff.

Producing Artistic Director Emeritus Spiro Veloudos is in the director's chair for AGATHA CHRISTIE'S MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS and stages Ken Ludwig's adaptation with distinct shadings of film noir and a who's who of Lyric Stage Company veterans (and a couple of newbies) on board to play the rogue's gallery of characters. If you already know whodunnit, the fresh take on telling the story will be worth the fare, and if you don't know who commits the dastardly deed, you're in for more than a few juicy surprises.

What do you get when you mix aspects of GYPSY, THE BAD SEED, and ALL ABOUT EVE with a heavy dose of camp and a soupçon of soap opera? RUTHLESS! THE MUSICAL, an all-female homage to overly-ambitious child actors, sleazy agents, poison pen critics, and jealous understudies that is a star vehicle for a little girl with stars in her eyes. In its second season on the Boston theater scene, Theater UnCorked takes a first crack at musical comedy and, even as it hits a few bumps along the way, it hits the funny bone again and again.

A septuagenarian suffering from Alzheimer's may seem an unlikely hero, but in QUIXOTE NUEVO, playwright Octavio Solis' adaptation of Miguel Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE, a retired Mexican-American college professor fearlessly takes on the Border Patrol, aids migrants, and models the importance of resilience while searching for his long-lost love. Pursued by death in the form of a colorful band of a?oecalacasa?? from the spirit world, his worried sister and niece, and the therapist and priest who want to take him to an assisted living facility, Jose a?oeJoea?? Quijano becomes convinced that he is Don Quixote and sets off on a quest to find his Dulcinea, the migrant girl he fell in love with as a boy on his father's farm.

a?oeUnlike any THE SEAGULL you can ever imaginea?? sums up the Arlekin Players Theatre production of Anton Chekhov's classic. An original adaptation with script translation by Ryan McKittrick, Julia Smeliansky, and Laurence Senelick, and directed by Igor Golyak, it features imaginative staging and the work of a stellar ensemble. Performance highlights provided by Anne Gottlieb, Nael Nacer, Eliott Purcell, and Irina Bordian.

Hub Theatre Company of Boston concludes its seventh season with an ambitious undertaking, the time-bending, courtroom dramatic comedy, THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT by Pulitzer Prize winning and Tony Award nominated playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis. Boston audiences will recognize his name from two acclaimed productions at SpeakEasy Stage Company in recent years, THE MOTHERFUCKER WITH THE HAT and BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY. First staged Off-Broadway at The Public Theater in 2005, THE LAST DAYS is set in Hope, a corner of Purgatory, where a trial is being held to determine Judas' fate: should he ascend to Heaven, or remain in Hell for his crime of betraying Jesus?

Ronán Noone is an Irish-American playwright, an immigrant, who writes about what he knows and what he has lived. In his most recent work, THE SMUGGLER, which won the Best Playwright award at the 1st Irish Festival of New York, 2019, he allocates much of that knowledge and experience to the protagonist, Tim Finnegan. Taking on the role and commanding the stage at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, award-winning actor Billy Meleady's masterful performance gives a solo piece the effect of an ensemble of players telling the story.

It's probably just a coincidence, but two fine plays currently running at two award-winning regional theaters share an unusual commonality. Both focus on the issue of white privilege and the prevailing attitude that acknowledging its existence will end it. In THE THANKSGIVING PLAY at Lyric Stage Company of Boston, the idea is to honor Native Americans in an elementary school play without benefit of any of them participating. In ADMISSIONS, receiving its Boston premiere at SpeakEasy Stage Company, a couple of white liberal educators work hard to expand racial diversity at their small New England prep school, but their progressive values are tested when their exceptional son's Ivy League dreams are derailed. Remarkably, there are no indigenous people or people of color on stage in either production, an intentional, pointed omission by the playwrights.

Get in the mood for the rapidly approaching holiday season by going to the Lyric Stage Company of Boston's production of THE THANKSGIVING PLAY, a sharp and funny satire by Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse that holds a mirror up to reflect the craziness of political correctness on steroids. How does a quartet of white theater artists tell the Thanksgiving story and honor Native American Heritage Month in a 45-minute elementary school play without offending anyone while being historically accurate? Very carefully, and not without numerous false starts, each one more ridiculous than the last, until not to decide is to decide.

With the term a?oewitch hunta?? being bandied about ad nauseam in our national discourse, it seems an ideal moment to look back upon the actual witch hunt that occurred in Essex County, Massachusetts, at the end of the 17th century. SALTONSTALL'S TRIAL: THE SALEM WITH TRIAL'S UNTOLD STORY, a new play by Michael Cormier and Myriam Cyr at the Larcom Theatre in Beverly, does just that. It is a smart, ambitious production with a commanding performance by Elliot Norton and IRNE Award-winning actor Benjamin Evett in the title role and a 20-member ensemble representing the accused women, town residents, clergy, and officers of the Court.

Merrimack Repertory Theatre, in a co-production with Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago and City Theatre in Pittsburgh, presents Lauren Yee's CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND, a play that fuses history, family legacy, and rock concert to illustrate the power and importance of music. It focuses on a daughter's attempt to unearth family history by journeying to Cambodia, her father's homeland, and searching for a survivor from a brutal Khmer Rouge prison whose testimony could seal the fate of its tyrannical overseer.

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW was a staple of the Harvard Square entertainment scene from 1984 through 2012, enjoying an astounding 28-year run of Saturday midnight screenings at the late AMC Loews Theater. Just around the corner, Moonbox Productions returns to its Cambridge roots and blasts into its tenth season with THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW, the live musical version at a pop-up venue at 25 Brattle Street. The venue, a once and future retail site, has a strangely appropriate ambience, an air of temporariness that is in sync with the secret of the creepy country estate where the story takes place. The cast is loaded with triple threats who can sing, dance, and act, but the number one reason to see the show is Peter Mill's performance as Frank N. Furter

The National (non-equity) Tour of THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL settled in at the Boch Center's Wang Theatre this week and brought out families and children raised on the beloved Nickelodeon series. Joining a long list of animated shows adapted into Broadway musicals, this one is set apart by the clever collaboration with a wide variety of popular artists who composed individual songs, seamlessly curated, orchestrated, and arranged by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winner Tom Kitt (of Next to Normal). Based on the television series by Stephen Hillenburg, it was conceived and directed by Tina Landau and features a book by Kyle Jarrow, but the eclectic score is the crème de la crème of THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL.

Playwright Lindsay Joelle introduces us to the unique world of the Rebbe's loyal foot soldiers who travel around Manhattan in a Mitzvah Tank, performing good deeds and spreading the gospel of the Chabad-Lubavitch to non-observant and alienated Jews. In its New England premiere at New Repertory Theatre, under the direction of Celine Rosenthal, TRAYF focuses on the relationship between best friends Zalmy and Shmuel as they explore the boundaries of their faith and friendship.