The weather gods didn't bless the late August, midweek evening I attended “Merry Wives of Windsor” at Shakespeare & Company. The Roman Garden setting, particularly radiant in late summer when the early evening sun has its intense pre-autumn glow, didn’t host the performance of one of Shakespeare’s lesser comedies; a thick, rainy mist shifted the venue to the Rose Tent in the field below the main campus. Allyn Burrows, artistic director of Shake-and-Co (as it’s affectionately

Berkshire Opera Festival’s excellent “Don Pasquale” is everything a comic opera ought to be: funny, broadly played by agile actors; lively, with a libretto sung by great voices; and lyrical, with music played by a fine orchestra. It’s also – at the end of a so-so Berkshire season when it comes to musicals - emerges as one of the highlights of the summer, both musically and theatrically; dare we say musical theatre? BOF's production IS one of the best musicals of the Berkshi

“It was joke", Lincoln tells his younger brother Booth, why their father named them as he did. But there’s no joke about the desperate struggle to survive in the Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” in a wrenching, vivid production at Shakespeare & Company. The African American brothers teeter on tragedy’s edge in Booth’s rundown SRO, where Lincoln (Bryce Michael Wood) is temporarily staying. Lincoln works as a costumed Honest Abe in whiteface at a cheap arcade, where patro

"Fall Springs", a new musical, is a cartoon. Cartoon plot. Cartoon scenery . Cartoon characters. Mayor Bradley, a Mister Rogers-like small town pol, is planning Fall Springs' semi-centennial as a center of drilling for essential oils, a natural key ingredient in lotions, cosmetics and the like. His committee is made up of: Robert, wannabe dancer and convention center director ; Veronica, a dumb blond real estate agent; and, Beverly, manager of the oil-drilling corpora

If ever there were an example of how an accomplished actress can overcome ho-hum material, it is the marvelous Penny Fuller in Kathleen Clark’s “What We May Be” on the Stockbridge Main Stage of the Berkshire Theatre Group. Almost 80, Ms. Fuller, who started her Broadway career as the replacement lead in “Barefoot in the Park” in 1963, embraces the role of Lucinda Royal Scott, doyenne of a local theatre, with youthful vim and vigor. In contrast, the new script, in its premie

Williamstown Theatre Festival concludes its 2019 season with not only the most authentic dramatic depiction of recovering alcoholics but also the best single performance on a Berkshire stage all summer. Playwright Adam Bock’s “Before the Meeting” is genuine through and through, without a trace of pretense, sentiment or artifice. And Deirdre O’Connell’s performance as an 11-year member of Alcoholics Anonymous, including a jaw-dropping monologue, rings true every single aston

It’s hard to imagine a more intimate or powerful production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s "The Brothers Size" than the probing, searing version on stage at the Ancram Opera House. Director Martine Kei Green -Rogers totally realizes McCraney’s multi-textured storytelling of prose, song and dance, putting three fabulous actors in your face (just about) off a thrust stage and into the audience in the compact, old grange hall in upstate Hudson Valley. In prologue, prophetically, t

It’s rare to find a contemporary American drama that is neither, on one end, steeped in cynicism nor, at the other, drenched in sentiment; rare, too, to find a story about an American family that doesn’t celebrate dysfunction. The family in Rachel Bond’s beautifully and economically composed “Curve of Departure”, in New England premier at Chester Theatre Company, is as non-conforming in its make-up as it is in its problems. The simple elegance of this taut, two-scene, 75 mi

At least Williamstown Theater Festival aspired to something different in its disappointing, ultimately lifeless, production of Henry Ibsen’s “Ghosts”. It would be folly to try to replicate director Richard Eyre’s electric Almeida Theatre production with a defining lead performance by Lesley Manville that visited BAM back in 2014. Still, WTF has invested fully in looking anew at the Ibsen landmark, with a new translation of the Norwegian (originally commissioned by American C

The first act of “If I Forget” is perhaps the best composed and dynamically plotted piece of theatre with ensemble acting the Berkshires has seen so far this season. It’s summer 2000 (election year Bush v. Gore, remember how that doozy turned out?). Agnostic, professor of Jewish Studies, Michael Fisher (J. Anthony Crane) and his non-practicing Christian wife Ellen (Kathleen Wise) visit his father’s home in a white, middle-class section of Washington DC a year after his moth