So far, it’s a pretty damn good season, with two excellent musicals, both of which I’ve fully reviewed - director Daniel Fish’s dark, provocative re-examination of OKLAHOMA! with country/western orchestrations and the soulful marriage of Irishman Conor McPherson’s journey through Depression-era America with the songs of America’s native son Bob Dylan in GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY. Speaking of Irish, it’s hard to find more riveting staged storytelling than Jez Butterworth’

MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET celebrates cabaret to tell a gay love story, and sweetly and unexpectedly transcends its limitations with poignant observations about gay culture. It’s the mid-1960s and lounge singer Trevor Copeland falls in love with his closeted pianist and composer. They find safe haven for performances of their uncompromising lyrics for he-and-he love songs at a West Village cellar dive, The Never Get, on weekend midnights. As in many backstage melodramas, t

A versatile, summer Berkshire theater season concludes with two very solid productions of “serious” drama from 20th century playwrights, one of America’s most famous, the other, a highly influential, but lesser-known, Italian. On its main stage in Pittsfield, Barrington Stage Company presents a very fine, very true production of Tennessee Williams' “The Glass Menagerie”. Director Julie Boyd fully embraces Williams' beautiful, poetic writing, and lets it speak beautifully,

We’ve seen OKLAHOMA! many times before, but never like director Daniel Fish’s startling version at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Fearless, provocative and totally unconventional this OKLAHOMA!, might well be seen as boldly innovative as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 production, regarded as the first “modern musical” to integrate fully book, action, music and dance. With white-hot textual focus, exciting new country /western musical arrangements and daring production technique, F

One needn’t be a devotee of Bob Dylan to appreciate how the poetry of his song fits an Irish poetic vision of Depression-era America in GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY in its US premier at The Public Theatre. First performed at the London’s Old Vic before its West End transfer last year, GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY plumbs the American soul through both the brooding Irish fatalism of Conor McPherson, award-winning playwright of THE WEIR, and the lyrical introspection of America’