One could get pretentious and quote Steven Samuels's essay "Charles Ludlam: A Brief Life," which identifies Irma Vep as "a gothic romp on the theme of eternal love." (It is suggested that Lord Edgar and Lady Enid were lovers in a far sandier past life.) But that's pushing it. This innocent (despite more than a few double entendres), still-hilarious relic from the early, campy days of gay theater is more accurately described by director Veloudos as a "tour de farce," one for which he knew he had in the bald, blowzy Casey and the wiry, more intense Kuntz — both moving faster than a weekend excursion to Transylvania via Manderley, Thornfield, and Cairo — the perfect tourists.
Related:
Dodging death, Autumn garden, Love and politics, More
- Dodging death
Even the sweetest life can shatter in an instant, sending you through the looking glass like Alice. For the euphoric heroine of Craig Lucas's 1988 fable of holiday festivity and arbitrary mayhem, Reckless the moment of reckoning comes when her husband tearfully confesses, on Christmas Eve, that he has taken out a contract on her life.
- Autumn garden
It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.
- Love and politics
In Boleros for the Disenchanted , Puerto Rican–born José Rivera looks beyond the fairy dust and sexual spark to probe the full meaning of “till death do us part.”
- Crucibles
There was room for more than one young Jewish diarist in the occupied Amsterdam of World War II. Anne Frank, who died as a teen, is a 20th-century icon. But until recently, her feisty innocence hid Etty Hillesum's fire.
- Pass the jelly
It came about “because I knew a girl who wanted to wear a tutu on stage.”
- Love and war
Shakespeare might have subtitled All’s Well That Ends Well (presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Cambridge Family YMCA Theater through May 14) Smart Women, Foolish Choices .
- SpeakEasy's The New Century, Cabaret at New Rep
The New Century , a quartet of related short plays by Paul Rudnick, takes its name from the discount department store Century 21.
- The games people play
Who’s afraid of Edward Albee?
- Boston Theater Marathon 2008
- It’s a man’s world
It’s hardly Shakespeare’s most frequently produced work, but in the Bard’s early career, Titus Andronicus was one of his most popular plays.
- Play by play: October 30, 2009
Boston's weekly theater schedule
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Topics:
Theater
, Lyric Stage Company, Lyric Stage Company, John Kuntz, More
, Lyric Stage Company, Lyric Stage Company, John Kuntz, John Kuntz, Charles Ludlam, Charles Ludlam, Dewey Dellay, Dudley Do-Right, Brynna Bloomfield, Irma Vep, Less