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ASP's Twelfth Night enters laughing

Clown show
The challenge in any production of Twelfth Night isn't the love triangle.

By STEVE VINEBERG | October 12, 2011

review of theater play Sons of the Prophet at Calderwood

Calling Kahlil

Sons of the Prophet can't live on laughs
Sons of the Prophet can't live on laughs

By STEVE VINEBERG | April 22, 2011

ASP's Henry IV, Part I
The work of Actors' Shakespeare Project is generally smart and imaginative, so the company's thoroughly misbegotten Henry IV, Part I , the first half of ASP's The Coveted Crown (at Midway Studios through November 21), comes as a surprise.

By STEVE VINEBERG | October 12, 2010

Review: The Huntington's Bus Stop

All aboard for this smooth ride
Bus Stop is hardly a neglected masterpiece, or even William Inge's best play (that would be Picnic ), but when you watch Nicholas Martin's production, the Huntington's season opener (at the Boston University Theatre through October 17), you understand why it was a hit on Broadway in 1955.

By STEVE VINEBERG | September 29, 2010

Curse and worse

Johnny Baseball is stuck in the minors
The high point of Johnny Baseball , the new musical receiving its world premiere from the American Repertory Theater (at the Loeb Drama Center through June 27), comes two-thirds of the way through the second act.

By STEVE VINEBERG | June 09, 2010

The garden of Vittorio De Sica

Mostly high points at the Harvard Film Archive
Vittorio De Sica, the subject of a major retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive, "Vittorio De Sica — Neo-Realism, Melodrama, Fantasy," was a movie star in Italy before he became a filmmaker.

By STEVE VINEBERG | June 02, 2010

Mostly noir

And mostly masterpieces, at the Museum of Fine Arts, June 2-13.
The definition of film noir has become elastic through the years. Of the five movies included in the MFA’s series “Rialto’s Best of British Film Noir” only two, strictly speaking, are noirs: Brighton Rock, Graham Greene & Terence Rattigan’s adaptation of Greene’s novel, and The Third Man, Greene’s most famous collaboration with the filmmaker Carol Reed.

By STEVE VINEBERG | May 26, 2010

Reversal of fortunes

Timon of Athens from Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Prelude to a Kiss from the Huntington
Timon of Athens is Shakespeare’s least characteristic tragedy, and the toughest to pull off.

By STEVE VINEBERG | May 25, 2010

J.D. Salinger: 1919 - 2010

In Memoriam
J.D. Salinger was 91 when he died in his New Hampshire home on January 27, 45 years after he published his last known story, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in the New Yorker .

By STEVE VINEBERG | February 05, 2010

Review: The Last Station

Lions in winter: a Tolstoyan feast
Traversing the spectrum from farce to tragedy, Michael Hoffman's magnificent The Last Station suggests what the story of Count Leo Tolstoy's final days would look like if Chekhov had told it.

By STEVE VINEBERG | February 24, 2010

The rules of his game

'Celebrating Chekhov' at the Museum of Fine Arts
Given that every theater season seems to bring a new production of a Chekhov play, it's surprising that so few movies have been made of his dramas, or of his short stories. Or maybe not so surprising: Chekhov is perilously difficult for filmmakers.

By STEVE VINEBERG | January 20, 2010

Eric Rohmer 1920 - 2010

In Memoriam
No other filmmaker mined precisely the same territory as the French director Eric Rohmer, who died Monday at the age of 89.

By STEVE VINEBERG | January 13, 2010

Prince of darkness

Gordon Willis at the Harvard Film Archive
Gordon Willis, the master cinematographer to whom the Harvard Film Archive pays tribute in a seven-film retrospective beginning this Friday,

By STEVE VINEBERG | November 18, 2009

Awake! Awake!

Sleep No More brings Macbeth to Brookline
Sleep No More , the second entry in the American Repertory Theater’s mini-season of revisionist Shakespeare, is the least orthodox production of Macbeth you’re likely to see. In fact, it’s linked to Macbeth as much by poetic allusion as by narrative — which is to say that it’s a little of both.

By STEVE VINEBERG | October 21, 2009

Brush up your Porter

Kiss Me, Kate at the Lyric
With its supreme Cole Porter score and its robustly entertaining book by Sam and Bella Spewack, the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate is surely one of the half-dozen best Broadway musicals.

By STEVE VINEBERG | September 16, 2009

Monster man and more

James Whale at the HFA
James Whale's career as a purveyor of marvelous film entertainments was brief.

By STEVE VINEBERG | September 08, 2009

Sins of the play

Israel Horovitz returns to Gloucester
The title of Israel Horovitz's Sins of the Mother (through September 13 at Gloucester Stage) is an ironic misnomer.

By STEVE VINEBERG | September 02, 2009

Splendor on the screen

Elia Kazan at the HFA
The arc of Elia Kazan's professional life has its origins in the Group Theatre, where he was trained as an actor and performed in the original 1930s productions of Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy .

By STEVE VINEBERG | July 29, 2009

What John did and saw

Dillinger and Manhattan Melodrama
In anticipation of the July 1 release of Michael Mann's Public Enemies with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, and as part of its week-long "Classic Gangsters" series, the Brattle is screening two rarely seen films this Sunday: John Milius's 1973 Dillinger and W.S. Van Dyke's Manhattan Melodrama.

By STEVE VINEBERG | June 16, 2009

Dark passage

Film noir and the Production Code at the MFA
The Production Code, Hollywood's notorious self-censorship program, was instituted by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in 1930, but it didn't go into effect till 1934, when it was administered by Joseph I. Breen.

By STEVE VINEBERG | May 27, 2009

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