A whole lot of deconstruction of the classics going on this month, along with productions of scripts by familiar homegrown names, from William Inge and David Mamet to Sarah Ruhl. A visit from a master puppeteer and a show about race that’s “recommended for mature audiences” look intriguing.
By Bill Marx
The Real Inspector Hound by Tom [...]

By Bill Marx
The month contains plenty of summerish entertainment, from a new baseball musical to a campy Alfred Hitchcock parody and a jazzy update of The Mikado. For me, the standouts are the more demanding fare, such as a festival of new American theater pieces and an exciting opportunity see Shakespeare’s rarely staged Timon of [...]

Artists should “no longer huddle in the confines of a painted box set” but instead join together to “find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time” and dramatize “the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country and his world.” – Hallie Flanagan, Federal Theatre Project
Stick Fly [...]

Highlights on stage this month include the world premiere of a drama about evolution by a respected local playwright and an intriguing collection of plays and musicals that bring an unusual perspective to topics ranging from love and music to extinction and dehumanization. And the wait is over: a show featuring singing dinosaurs has arrived.

By [...]

More than any other art, theater asks for relevance. A play that convinces us that “this is the way it is now” can be excused many shortcomings. At any one moment there is a particular quality of feeling which dominates in human intercourse, a tonality which marks the present from the past, and when this [...]

Commedia dell’arte performers doing their thing in the HTC world premiere production of “The Miracle at Naples.”

The Miracle at Naples, a new comedy by David Grimm. Directed by Peter DuBois. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, through May 9, 2009.
Reviewed by Bill [...]

By Bill Marx
The Huntington Theatre Company’s Breaking Ground Festival of new play readings turns five this year. The latest lineup runs through Sunday at the shindig’s venue, the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. Scripts by Melinda Lopez, Ken Urban, Mat Smart and Nathan Louis Jackson, as well as a [...]

By Bill Marx
Shining City, by Conor McPherson. Directed by Robert Falls. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company, through April 6 at the Boston University Theatre.

John Judd and Jay Whittaker gas on about a pesky ghost
At their best, ghost stories frolic in the freedom of the imagination: the writer generates his or her delicious shocks [...]

War is hell, as the Boston Phoenix theater critic Carolyn Clay would have it, but she doesn’t seem to realize that the inferno is a moving target. And it is the diminishing capacity of contemporary American theater to imagine violence and its effects that interests me most about the Huntington Theater Company’s current revival of [...]

Brazenly predictable, fearlessly anachronistic, Ronan Noone’s Brendan, which is receiving its world premiere production from the Huntington Theatre Company, is the kind of inspirational tearjerker comedy that is pleasant enough to sit through but damned depressing to think about.
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