The cast are game and energetic. They all have their moments (I loved Wooddell's blissed-out response to a kiss), but Latessa and DeVito are especially good. You can see and hear DeVito's famous dad in every one of her scenes; her deadpan boisterousness must make him proud. Latessa, the veteran performer best known as Harvey Fierstein's husband in the Broadway musical Hairspray, has a Borscht Belt spirit and the kind of timing a young comic would kill for. Commedia thrives on cultural stereotyping — the actors would land in a new town, spend the day soaking up local references and gossip, and flatter their audience by sending up the other places they'd passed through. Latessa handles this kind of broad putdown humor masterfully; it's commedia by way of the burlesque house. DuBois's skillful staging takes advantage of all the corners supplied by Alexander Dodge's nifty, forced-perspective set, and Rui Rita's lighting design achieves moments of real beauty. The show isn't perfect, but it's rarely less than pleasurable.
Related:
Sox trump comedy, Autumn garden, Play by Play: May 1, 2009, More 
- Sox trump comedy
"Being bitter is poison and bitter will kill you. Bitter is a root that will grow a poopy tree of death."
- 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.
- Play by Play: May 1, 2009
Theater around town
- Zero at the bone
A bleak expressionist fable centered on a murderous bookkeeper symbolically named Zero. Even when you throw in sexual repression, religious zealotry, a trip to Heaven, and enough dissonance to sate Stephen Sondheim, that doesn’t sound like the stuff of song and dance.
- Get me remix
The Brothers Grimm generally managed to live up to their name.
- Review: Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation, Body Awareness, and The Aliens
Over the river and through the woods from Grover's Corners lies Shirley, VT, Green Mountain stand-in for college-centric Amherst, MA, where playwright Annie Baker grew up.
- Review: Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis
The Boston Lyric Opera, with Boston Classical Orchestra music director Steven Lipsitt and a company of singers and designers largely new to Boston, has given us a memorable production of the opera that composer Viktor Ullmann and poet Petr Kien created in 1943 at the Terezín concentration camp, The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Quits .
- Company One takes on Jason Grote's whirling 1001
Grote uses the same framing device as the original One Thousand and One Nights , which begins with Shahriyar (Nael Nacer) discovering his wife's infidelity and deciding that the only way to prevent his future wives from cheating is to marry virgins, deflower them, and execute them the next morning.
- Cambridge moves to Boston in Before I Leave You
Fear of mortality is a domino in Before I Leave You, the play with which 72-year-old dramatist Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, who has been flexing her inky fingers in Cambridge for 40 years, enters the big time.
- Photos: Boston Symphony Orchestra & Claremont Trio
The Claremont Trio inaugurated the Gardner Museum’s new Calderwood Hall, and John Harbison's Symphony No. 6 performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of David Zinman.
- Luck of the Irish is good for the Huntington
There is more than one way to view A Raisin in the Sun .
- Less
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