Just when it looked like Williamstown Theatre Festival had eschewed sitcom-style fare along comes Sharyn Rothstein’s “Tell Me I’m Not Crazy”, a clichéd pablum of social issues squeezed into an endless 100 minute television comedy/melodrama format. Sixty-two year old Sol (Mark Blum), forced into retirement after a lifetime on the job, buys a gun to protect his condo unit from a spat of robberies. The gun offends the moral sensitivities of his 60 year old, school teacher wife

“Moulin Rouge”, the big-budget, huge-cast, over-the-top stage version of Baz Luhrman’s 2001hit movie, is extravagant commercial entertainment more than theatre musical. Commerce pervades this ultra-jukebox spectacle. Montmartre, Paris, 1899 was never more lavish: The interior of the Hirschfeld Theatre interior is drenched in red and gold, making the set of “Natasha Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812” look like an old Five and Dime. The box seats are retrofit with huge re

Reposted review of August 2016 premiere production of BROADWAY BOUNTY HUNTER at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield MA. Now Off-Broadway at Greenwich House Theatre. BROADWAY BOUNTY HUNTER, a sassy, joyous, booty-shakin’, dyno-mite new musical in its world premiere in the Berkshires, tests how Barrington Stage Company’s small St. Germaine theatre can handle all the talented power exploding on its compact stage. Written by the stylistically versatile composer and lyricist Jo

“If you’re not going to grow, don’t live” proclaims Hazel from a small cottage on the rural coast of England where she and her husband Robin have sheltered after a recent meltdown at the nearby nuclear plant and ensuing tsunami displaced them from their farm. They were physicist and engineer at the facility, which remains a dangerous threat, from its construction through their retirement. In the wake of the crisis, Rose, formerly the chief engineer, visits unexpectedly af

So what if “Road Show” isn’t Stephen Sondheim’s greatest musical? In a spirited concert performance ,sprightly directed by Will Davis at Encores!, the master of late 20th century musical theatre still demonstrates that even his non-masterpieces transcend the banal pop-rock of most Broadway fare today. And so what if Jonathan Weidman, who wrote the books for Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” and “Assassins”, has written better characters? At least, the Mizner brothers aren't

It’s ambitious for any playwright to adapt for the stage a novel by one of the best authors of modern times, with that novel, in turn, based on one of the greatest tragedies by the greatest playwright of all time. That’s the challenge that accomplished playwright Mark St. Germain (“Camping with Henry and Tom”, “ Freud’s Last Session” best known to Berkshire audiences) faces in adapting John Updike’s “Gertrude and Claudius”, a prequel to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. In the progra

On the surface, there’s no timelier proverbial middle finger to Trump’s recent nomination of an anti-labor ideologue to be Secretary of Labor than Berkshire Theatre Group’s WORKING: A MUSICAL, based on Stud Terkel’s 1974 book that was first staged in 1978. But director James Barry, working from 2012 revisions to the musical, rises far above the nasty polemic of today’s headlines to render an unflinching, eloquent and poignant picture of America at the crossroads of its real

The pounding flight of helicopter overhead signals danger in the very opening minutes of “Selling Kabul”, a tense, captivating thriller drama set in the Afghan capital in 2013 just after a drawdown of American forces. Hidden in the apartment below, Taroon (Babak Tafti) a former interpreter for American military awaits nervously for a message from his US contact and for news about his wife in labor. The Taliban have been searching for him and harassing his wife whom he hasn

“I know you want everything to be clear and simple” is the last chorus of the fabulous chamber opera, “Acquanetta”, about the voluptuous, B-movie actress who had a sunstorm of celebrity in the 1940s. Indeed, the narrative structure “Acquanetta” is rather uncomplicated based on a single scene in the cult classic “Captive Wild Women” where Acquanetta played a wild, ravishing creature surgically transmuted from an ape by a mad doctor. But “Acquanetta” 's themes are anything b

Whether by directorial design or acting chops, women rule Berkshire Theatre Groups’ vital, textually-focused production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth”. The 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning “comedy”, first produced as Americans were crawling out of the Depression and marching headlong to another World War, a strange, often bewildering tale in three parts, is about the Antrobus family of New Jersey who survive Ice Age, Great Flood and War. This allegory for the how th