Boston’s Best Theater 2009
It was a year of change in Boston theater, most noticeably at the American Repertory Theater where Diane Paulus took over as artistic director and is giving the company a major makeover. With three hit plays currently playing in theater spaces in Cambridge and Brookline, Paulus is off to an excellent start.
Over at the Huntington new artistic director Peter Dubois is making his stamp on the company through a mix of established hits and new works under the umbrella a season of American Stories. If Fences is an example of the quality of work he will be bringing to the company, then the theater is in great hands.
There was great theater from smaller venues, which these picks by EDGE critics attest. Here are our choices for Best Theater in Boston in 2009.
Kay Bourne’s choices
Thanks to the imaginative and skillful direction of Peyton Pugmire that oft told mystery And Then There Were None at The Footlight Club was a night of chills, not stifled yawns. His fine hand was everywhere from a set he designed that was as hospitable to ghostly creatures as it was inhospitable to the living. The sounds of the sea lashing the rocks at the bottom of a precipice on which is perched this mansion of horrors added to the atmosphere. Here the price will be exacted at long last from ten murderers who might have believed they got away with their awful crimes. Add in a shadow cast comprised of the wraiths in ghastly rags and masks who are the people the mansion’s visitors sent to their deaths. Jon Bonner lit the dead as well as the living extremely well. Even Jamaica Plain’s Eliot Hall was an extension of the mansion, its polished wood paneling dimly lit by electric candles in the wall sconces. The excellent cast of actors, perfectly dressed in period costumes by Maureen Festa and coffered by Jenny Bragdon, came across as stereotypes of British society of the 30s as they should and yet also seemed very human.
Metro Stage Company’s non-Equity production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical
Strength, speed, spandex read the banner for The Superheroines Monologues. As you might readily guess and guess correctly, the original parody from Rick Park and John Kuntz brought American cartoon figures to the stage in a campy night that was lots of fun and clever as well. The chronology of the women who protect the world from villains even while they nurse personal wounds was superlatively directed by Greg Maraio who kept the action figures hopping. He also showed his own super heroic powers by providing the hip costume design and construction heavy on the spandex and gloriously eye catching in those bold colors that blaze in the memory of comic book collectors. The tireless Maraio also did the clever scenic design (with Jared Fennelly) that provides marvelously telltale backdrops to every heroine’s story with whimsical touches even to talking Ionic pedestals in the land of the Amazons which opens the story. This exhilarating night at the theater was produced cooperatively by Phoenix Theatre Artists & Company One.
Jennifer Bubriski ’s choices
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Lyric Stage) -- Georgia Lyman burned the Lyric stage as Maggie the Cat in this flawed but moving revival.
Avenue Q (Colonial Theatre, national tour) -- A solid, energetic production of a fantastically written show.
Howie Green’s choices
Just when you think you’ve seen everything that live theatre has to offer comes a production so cleverly staged and imaginatively presented that it could very well make you rethink everything you know about theatrical productions. The Stoneham Theater’s production of The Sparrow was one of the very best live stage performances to ever hit Boston. It was unique and unlike anything else and will stick in memory for years to come. The Sparrow was originally developed and produced by The House Theatre of Chicago whose founder, this production’s director, Nathan Allan, is a major talent to be watched.
The Reagle Players full blown, over-the-top production of the Jerry Herman / Harvey Fierstein smash hit Broadway musical La Cage Aux Folles was an onslaught of feathers, sequins and outlandish costumes, and a virtuoso performance by Broadway veteran David Engel in the role of drag queen extraordinaire Zaza/Albin. Jamie Ross was also terrific as Albin’s partner, the ever-suffering nightclub owner Georges, and David Scala did an admirable job of recreating the original production right down to the last false eyelash and wig. Everything that made La Cage a huge hit - the costumes, the sets, the humor and mostly Jerry Herman’s timeless music - was intact with this production and the Reagle Players got everything right. And a special nod to the live orchestra who was flawless.
The Wheelock Family Theatre’s production of Seussical The Musical (the show that every theatre fan loves to hate) was a surprise. The revised book was staged with an expansive cast of pros and amateurs with colorful sets and was as much fun as a theatrical production base on the works of Dr. Seuss should be. Staged and produced with the Wheelock’s usual ’everything-and-the-kitchen-sink’ style of all-inclusive casting and audience interaction, the whole extravaganza worked perfectly.
Robert Israel’s choices
Israel Horovitz’s Sins of the Mother (Gloucester Stage Company, Gloucester) told the story of fishermen living on the edge, whose misspent and endangered lives come to harrowing and tragic ends in Gloucester, a fishing port that is itself endangered. Actor Robert Walsh was particularly compelling as the character Bobby Maloney who showed us his burnt core and pain.
Tennessee Williams’ Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen (Infinite Theater Company, New York, at the Fourth Annual Tennessee Williams Festival, Provincetown). Two actors entered a claustrophobic room in Gifford House in Provincetown, and played the roles of a man and a woman, both lost, reeling from self-inflicted traumas. Williams’ language is rich, poetic, and haunting. Written in 1953 and rarely performed, the one-act play left an impression of the tenderness and the alienation of the human experience.
In his Pulitzer-prize winning Fences, August Wilson’s characters flail one another with hearts and spirits bursting with pride, love, dashed hopes, and mendacity. The Huntington Theatre Company cast gave us a glimpse into these earthly follies and left us with the hope that spiritual transcendence may also be a path we might one day discover.
Kilian Melloy’s choices
Stephen Karam’s Speech & Debate was given top-notch treatment by director Jeremy Johnson at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston last spring. The three young leads-Alex Wyse, Chris Connor, and Rachael Hunt-turned in dazzling performances, but it was the play’s skillfully effervescent handling of hot-button topics--abortion, ex-gays, faith-based discrimination, media-driven sensationalism, careerism-that both made the show, and stole it. This play is a gift to gay teens-or anybody who used to be one.
The Actors’ Shakespeare Project brought its trademark intelligence and creativity to The Taming of the Shrew this autumn, with Benjamin Evett, taking on the lead male role, literally tossing the script aside to symbolize the troupe’s gleefully original interpretation of the text. Under director Melia Bensussen, the production-set in a bar-celebrated feminine power and tipped its hat to the prankish aura of mystique that con men (and women) have long enjoyed. In love and scams, who’s fooling whom? That’s the question the troupe posed and played with, to terrific comic effect.
Tru Grace: Holiday Memoirs. The double bill holiday production offered by Wesley Savick, who adapted and directed two Christmas stories (The Loudest Voice by Grace Paley and A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote) was charming for the holiday theme, the stylistic staging, and the cute kids featured in the cast, but it was truly memorable for the reading of Truman Capote’s lovely prose as delivered by Michael Forden Walker, who played Buddy, Capote’s boyhood persona and narrator of holiday hijinks in a pastoral, rural America. Debra Wise more than held her own on stage next to Walker as Sookie, Buddy’s elderly cousin. Together, Walker and Wise brought the house to gales of laughter-and to the brink of tears.
Robert Nesti’s choices
August Wilson’s 1987 Fences won him a Pulitzer and a Tony and established him as a national playwright of note. Yet despite his long relationship with the Huntington Theatre Company, the play had never been performed in Boston before. It was well worth the wait. The production, at the Huntington, was exemplary in every possible way - from the highly realistic designs (by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg) to a superb cast, led by John Beasley and Crystal Fox. Wilson’s tragedy of a man succumbing to his weaknesses was vividly staged by Kenny Leon, who has become the leading director of Wilson’s works around the country. Powerful theater.
No one knew what to expect when Diane Paulus took over the American Repertory Theater, and what they got was something completely different (and unexpected). Three theatrical experiences each rooted in Shakespeare given the umbrella title Shakespeare Exploded! And explode he did - for once an exclamation point in a title isn’t hyperbole. Opening first was The Donkey Show, which transformed the company’s Zero Arrow Street space into a disco called Oberon and put a 1970s twist on Shakespeare’s mix-up lovers. The music is disco from the period, the costumes are polyester, and the enthusiasm is through the roof as the actors move through the crowd in their romantic, often sexual pursuits. Written by Paulus and her husband Randy Weiner, The Donkey Show was a long running hit in New York and is repeating that success here. Second came Sleep No More, which imagines Macbeth as a Hitchcockian fantasy, replete with Bernard Herrmann scoring, and is acted out in an amazingly evocative theater space - an old school reconfigured as a decrepit castle. The interactive concept and the performers came from the London-based company Punchdrunk. The result is one of the most imaginative and haunting theatrical presentations you’ll ever see. Not to be missed, though tickets are scarce. Lastly Paulus and Weiner rethought A Winter’s Tale as a R&B musical, cast it with a terrific cast of singing actors, and opened it in the long dark ART main stage at the Loeb. Called Best of Both Worlds, it soars on the power of its singing and redemptive theme. With this inventive trio, Paulus has done more to invigorate the Boston Theater than anyone has in decades.
