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Theater

Man and machine

Cirque Mechanics finds the balance
For anyone fascinated with wheels and gears, circus stunts, or political satire, a troupe of performers called Cirque Mechanics bring all that and more.

By JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | November 12, 2009

Music and revenge

Elemental Theatre’s masterful Amadeus
As a play, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus has more than its share of theatrical muscle.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | November 12, 2009

Perishable’s Anna Bella Eema gets primal
So you think that ghosts and goblins and vampires and werewolves are pretty scary creatures even when it’s not Halloween, hmmm? Well, that’s perfectly natural, but there’s one word in that sentence that lords it over every gibbering monster ever conceived: think.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | November 03, 2009

The road not taken

A brief encounter in Trinity’s Shooting Star
Shooting Star , by Steven Deitz, got its title from a Bob Dylan lyric that speaks of poignant regret.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 29, 2009

Brilliant and infuriating

The Gamm’s conflicted Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare didn’t slow dance when he wrote Romeo and Juliet — he went for the essence of impetuous young love like a brisk waltz.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 29, 2009

Walk on the wild side

Inner beasts are unleashed in Avenue Q
With Douglas Adams dead, where have we to turn for quirkily unconventional questions about life, the universe, and everything?

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 21, 2009

Emotional traffic

A love disconnection in Boy Gets Girl
As Halloween approaches and a frisson of fright chills the air, URI Theatre is presenting a psychologically taut staging of Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl .

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 21, 2009

Culture and choreography

Horse and Yellow Bird Dancers at FirstWorks
Not only is the FirstWorks organization devoted to presenting “first-time-in-Rhode Island” performances throughout their seven-week fall festival (through November 15), but the staff is also always seeking diversity of cultures, media, and experiences.

By JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | October 15, 2009

Love at second sight?

Chemistry is key in Trinity’s Shooting Star
The little two-person play that Trinity Repertory Company is staging in the intimate downstairs theater got its title from the poignant Bob Dylan song "Shooting Star."

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 13, 2009

I is another

Ed Shea’s tour de force in 2nd Story’s Wife
Lothar Berfelde was born both a generation too late and a generation too early, growing up as he did in Berlin when the Nazis were coming to power in the '30s.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 07, 2009

Monster mash

Young Frankenstein lumbers into PPAC
As high points of comedy go, the "Putting On the Ritz" routine in Mell Brooks's Young Frankenstein has to be one of the avalanche-inducing helpless-laughter pinnacles.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 30, 2009

Unfettered farce

Brown’s Tartuffe puts the roar in uproarious
Farce is designed for more than pleasant laughter and fingertips-to-palm applause. In celebration of that, an all-stops-out production of Molière’s Tartuffe is being staged at Brown University Theatre (through October 4), and it gets the audience to put the roar in uproarious.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | October 20, 2009

Best of the Bard

The Gamm’s masterful Much Ado About Nothing
The Comedy of Errors ? Ha. The Merry Wives of Windsor ? Ha; ha.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 30, 2009

Both new and old classics

Life on the boards
The Gamm certainly has come a long way in the quarter-century leading up to this its 25th anniversary season. The evolution of its name alone is quite a trip.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 16, 2009

Berlin calling

A ‘very Trinity’ take on Cabaret
If you ask someone whether they've seen Cabaret , odds are the answer will be yes. Ask Curt Columbus, and the answer is likely to be: Which one? Sitting in the upstairs theater of Trinity Repertory Company, where their production runs through October 11, the artistic director rattled off a chronology as lengthy as a convoluted German sentence.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 15, 2009

Face off

Doubt explores the quicksand of certainty
If you were an ordinary Catholic boy in parochial school, giving nuns as hard a time as you were getting, you probably ended up with the usual stories of ruler-rapped knuckles. If you grew up to be talented playwright John Patrick Shanley, you ended up writing Doubt: A Parable , a fascinating exploration of the quicksand of certainty.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 15, 2009

Embracing humanness

Stevie Jay's Life is a work in progress
Don't go listen to Stevie Jay if you want demure talk about sex, less than X-rated language about relationships, or polite, unemotional monologues about anything else he cares to tell you about.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 08, 2009

A royal scam

TBTS' terrific Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Admit it — we are all a little perverse. How else to explain the difficulty, unless you are comatose, in not laughing heartily at Dirty Rotten Scoundrels , the tale of two con men plying their criminal trade on the French Riviera.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 25, 2009

Imagine that

2nd Story's Harvey is simply delightful.
Mister Rogers is dead. Long live Elwood P. Dowd!

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 18, 2009

Mixed and mismatched

Errors are still comical in the bucket
Oh those Elizabethans, those cutups, those bawdy scamps. If we had only William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors to go by, we'd wonder how the Brits ever built an empire between all the misidentifications and panicked confusions.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 18, 2009