A PAIR OF EDITH WHARTON STORIES at SHAKESEPARE & COMPANY Adapter Dennis Krausnick and director Normi Noel reveal common themes in counterpoint in pairing two dramatizations of Edith Wharton's short stories at Shakespeare & Company. Arguably Wharton’s best known short story, ROMAN FEVER, is a taught study of envy, betrayal and deception. Two Manhattan society doyennes, recently widowed, revisit Rome in the 1920s, where decades before they were courted as prospective brides

CROWN PRINCE PRINCE OF BROADWAY, the new musical revue of the sensational career of Broadway impresario Hal Prince, is like a crown. Starting with a job as an assistant stage manager on a long-forgotten TICKETS PLEASE! (1950), Prince produced and/or directed nearly 60 productions, garnering 21 Tony Awards, more than anyone in history. PRINCE OF BRADWAY presents three dozen songs in impeccably staged segments from 17 of his productions, popular numbers and a few surprises,

SONDHEIM'S COMPANY - ALWAYS WELCOME (EVEN WHEN IT ISN'T DONE GREAT). Barrington Stage Company’s production of COMPANY is entertaining enough on the strength of Sondheim’s score and soloist vocals by Broadway leading man Aaron Tveit as Robert, a really-not-that-happy, 35 year-old bachelor. When it comes to COMPANY, I’m over-informed (some tell me jaded), having seen a lot of COMPANYs and lots of Roberts since Larry Kurt (alas, not Dean Jones) in the 1970 original - the 1995 L

SOME OLD BLACK MAN It’s newsworthy that James Anthony Tyler’s SOME OLD BLACK MAN is both Berkshire Playwrights Lab’s first fully staged production and the restored Saint James Place’s first staged play, but that buries the headline. SOME OLD BLACK MAN is the best original new play to premiere in the Berkshires this season. The premise of this beautifully rendered, economically composed two-hander is straightforward. Calvin Jones, a handsome, hip, coolly-intellectual, affluent

Barrington Stage Company’s THIS, a tightly composed, often funny, sometimes quirky, one-act, 90-minute, five-character drama is about grief. The topic isn’t that often explored with characters who are late30/ early 40somethings not yet ready for a full-blown mid-life crisis. Jane (played by Julia Coffey) has been widowed with a young daughter for a year. She pretends she’s not grieving, careening from emotional inertness to angry outbursts among her tight group of best frie

A LEGENDARY ROMANCE Ambitious describes the leading male characters at odds in A LEGENDARY ROMANCE at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and also the dramatic vision of this new musical. Former Hollywood hotshot producer Joseph Lindy (played by Jeff McCarthy), down-and-out in his retired years, wrestles with approving a new version of his uncompleted masterpiece. Looking back at his glory days, he recalls his love affair with the ingénue he discovered, Billie Hathaway (Lara

SHARON PLAYHOUSE’S THE MUSIC MAN: A CRYING SHAME Does “76 Trombones” mean a marching band? Not in Sharon Playhouse’s joyless, soulless version of THE MUSIC MAN. Instead, trombones are emoji bugles projected on a computer-like screen upper left quarter of a fixed set of a large bleacher. The screen is supposed to be the field of stars on the American flag; the closed bleacher tiers painted in dirty white and red are its stripes. The River City, Iowa of 1912 in Meredith Wi

AN ALBEE AT ITS BEST Berkshire Theatre Group’s production of EDWARD ALBEE’S AT HOME AT THE ZOO (ZOO STORY) is one of those rare occasions where the production not only is accurate to but also enhances the playwright’s text. Sounds like an obvious goal of a director, but it’s a notion curiously out-of-fashion these days with so many van Hove wannabees hell-bent on self-indulgent, director-driven, re-conceptions of venerable, well-known texts. Observing, or honoring, the pla