Retro and revelatory at once, with a sex-show climax that's more grotesque and menacing than erotic, The Donkey Show feels frenzied. But except for the actions of the audience, and the cast in reaction to the audience, its every caricatured move is precise, from those of the Mafia goon guarding the back room to butterfly-pasties-adorned Tytania's steamy acrobatics. (Performer Rebecca Whitehurst seems to live in a full split.) The opening-night cast included several ringers from the New York production, but I imagine that the dancer-actor athletes who replace them will be scrupulously well trained, and that the energy in the room will continue to suggest that, whatever Puck is pushing, the love juice in Shakespeare's little western flower is less cocaine than pure adrenaline.
Related:
Autumn garden, Play by play: May 14, 2010, The A.R.T.'s 21st-century Ajax, More 
- 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 14, 2010
Boston's weekly theater listings
- The A.R.T.'s 21st-century Ajax
An embittered soldier who snaps and commits a heinous act of violence? It's a wonder Sophocles's Ajax isn't performed as often as Hamlet .
- Tod Machover's Death and the Powers, plus Norrington's C.P.E. Bach and the Cantata Singers' B-minor Mass
In her director's note for the American premiere of Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera , Diane Paulus, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, wrote that this "work of music-theater . . . has brought together artists from the widest range of disciplines — from theater and film to modern dance and the cutting-edge technology of the MIT Media Lab."
- I loves you, Porgy
So shoot me, Porgy purists. To my mind, the retooling of The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess for American Repertory Theater is compelling enough to push past quibbles.
- Reimagining Porgy and Bess
In the new production at the American Repertory Theater, directed by Diane Paulus, Messrs. Heyward and Gershwin have been reworked by two actual African-Americans: two-time Obie Award winner Diedre L. Murray and Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
- The Lisps try to deliver a message in 'Futurity'
It isn't easy to put together a 90-minute musical that includes the Civil War, the birth of computer programming, indie rock, the internal dynamics of Lord Byron's family, mathematical formulas, and writing letters back and forth about an invention that will either save the world or be a precursor to the atom bomb.
- Tir Na’s Lonesome West, A.R.T.’s Woody Sez
Suffice it to say that Leenane is no city of brotherly love.
- Bard in the USA
"You know," Paulus observes, "we are the American Repertory Theatre, and we haven't spent a lot of time in the repertoire on American drama."
- Vintage Aquarius
Hair co-creator James Rado recalls a shady doc who showed up backstage to give the original cast amphetamine-laced "vitamin shots."
- Joyful noise
From the clamorous arrival of some ghetto hot wheels to a scorching gospel finale, Best of Both Worlds warms up The Winter's Tale . The third entry in American Repertory Theater's Shakespeare Exploded! Festival, this sizzling and soulful gloss on the Bard's late romance mines Shakespeare's time- and realm-hopping fairy tale.
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