Have you ever mocked how TV characters of modest means live in apartments way beyond their means (e.g., NBC’s Friends)? Rep Stage has a play for you. The regional premiere of Brooke Berman’s clever Hunting and Gathering features young New Yorkers facing the challenges of transience in a difficult real estate market and an equally […]
Rep Stage’s four show season includes a new musical about a drag queen with a mummy in her closet
Rep Stage will present a four-production season of stories about strange things, but doubtlessly none will be stranger than the story of Dorian’s Closet, a musical about the life of famed female impersonator Dorian Corey, featured in the documentary Paris is Burning. The Richard Mailman-Ryan Haase musical documents Corey’s rise through the drag circuits of […]
Antigone Project at Rep Stage (review)
Whether ancient Greece or modern megalopolises, women get a raw deal. The classic Greek playwright Sophocles wrote about this human predicament enduringly in his Oedipus plays, which charted a family curse cruelly played out from generation to generation. One of them, Antigone, shows a young woman defying capricious laws and politics to do what is […]
Shows from 2015 I’d pay top dollar to see again
I’m retired now as a critic and when I see a play it is generally as a civilian. In days of old, I might see upwards of a hundred fifty plays a year, and the experience was as commonplace for me as swatting mosquitoes or filing lawsuits. It became like going to an art gallery; […]
Jayne Blanchard’s Top 10 shows of 2015
10. Macbeth Not a stage production per se but a movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s brutal tragedy directed by Justin Kurzel whose extraordinary clarity of vision brings this tale of cruelty and revenge to savage life. Intensely atmospheric, the film is almost entirely shot in the Scottish countryside—full of mist and fog and fen—and shows us […]
Technicolor Life at Rep Stage
In Jami Brandli’s Technicolor Life, Maxine Hunter (Isa Guitan) is a precocious ninth grader with a passion for SAT words and troublemaking friends, but she has more on her plate than the typical highschooler: her philandering father is marrying his much-younger girlfriend, her cheerfully dying grandmother has moved in, her sister has returned from Iraq […]
UpClose: Jami Brandli, Women’s Voices Theater Festival
Technicolor Life by Jami Brandli debuts at Rep Stage OCtober 21, 2015.
Baltimore Waltz’s got crazy, randy rhythm at Rep Stage
One comfort in losing my mother at the age of 66 is that she comes to me in my dreams. Many nights, we get nocturnal do-overs as she stands before me healthy, warm and whole—the mother I remember, the mother as familiar to me as breathing.
Sunset Baby at Rep Stage
A child is a promise you send into the future. Someone said that to a reporter last week, trying to search out meaning from the rubble of the Baltimore fires.
Center Stage gives free Bob Marley concert Saturday to help heal Baltimore
While the nation watched, the streets of Baltimore erupted in violence Monday night, April 20th, in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. As the week unfolded and the city became locked down around them, we asked what the impact of these unprecedented events was having on the cast working on a […]
An engrossing Circle Mirror Transformation at Rep Stage
Pretending becomes a pretext for change in Annie Baker’s subtly engrossing Circle Mirror Transformation, which unfolds with verite veracity at Rep Stage under the direction of Suzanne Beal. The ensemble is so good at portraying a miscellaneous crew of small-town Vermonters enrolled in a summer creative drama class you often feel as though you are […]
Stunning production of The Whale at Rep Stage
Eating yourself to death. Not recommended. Trust me, I tried. The 400-lb. life I led 9 years and 190 lbs. ago was living from the neck up. Anything else was too hard, too painful.