Fresh Ham
With Northern Boulevard, Oldcastle promises a new old-fashioned musical. If you’re expecting Berlin, Porter or Gershwin, this show won’t quite provide the trip back, but if you’ll accept lesser...
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An Imperfect Creation
Too few people are familiar with the play that inspired My Fair Lady (and fewer still with the superior Leslie Howard/Wendy Hiller film version that proved most influential in the adaptation), which...
View ArticleHome Run
That this delight hasn’t yet made it to Broadway is perplexing, but perhaps this smash production will change its fortune. Certainly, it can’t be that a musical set in Fenway Park would not be...
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Verdi It Ain’t
The success of Robert James Waller’s pretentious and ripe novel with its inane prose and cliche-ridden plot was baffling. More puzzling was why a director as discriminating as Clint Eastwood would...
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Mild Pinterest
It would be a gross understatement to say that Blood Play is the most unusual play of the Williamstown Theatre Festival season; indeed this curiosity left many patrons scratching their heads and...
View ArticleBest Cinema 2013: Ralph Hammann
2013 was a particularly exciting year for women’s performances. Unfortunately, the list of best films does not pay tribute to all of the great work done by actresses. So, in addition to those cited...
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Feeling Blue
Let me be clear. George S. Kaufman is one of my heroes, and his collaborations with Moss Hart were defining moments in the golden age of American comedy. But his partnerships with other others were...
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Lost Intentions
Jeffrey DeMunn suffers indignities well and is always a compelling victim. He was ingested by alien jello in the remake of The Blob, given a bloody nose by a tentacled monster in The Mist, and...
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Dueling Divas
Former artistic director Jenny Gersten has given WTF audiences a terrific parting gift with this beautifully mounted, deftly written and gloriously acted and directed production. A musical or two...
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Smoke Not Fire
Tortured lovers in a way station on the outskirts of hell are at the center of Sam Shepard’s 70-minute propulsive one-act play. A number of patrons on opening night voiced puzzlement at what the...
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Revenge is Sweet
I had misgivings about this. First, it is an adaptation of a seemingly unadaptable morality play. Second, it bode ill that, given its songwriters’ stature, it never made it to Broadway when written...
View ArticleTransformed
Beautifully sung, smartly set and energetically staged at Oldcastle, My Fair Lady is a splendid fit for the company’s winningly intimate theater, which is currently brimming over with some of the...
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Year in Cinema 2014: Ralph Hammann
Best of 2014 1. Nightcrawler A wonderfully creepy black comedy that mashes up Taxi Driver and Network and succeeds in creating something original and timely—with what is truly Jake Gyllenhaal’s...
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Addled and Elevating
When one first encounters David Adkins as Henry David Thoreau on the Unicorn’s dark stage, he is crowing in discordant concert with a rooster, putting one more in anticipation of Peter Pan than the...
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False Hearts
The WTF’s new artistic director, Mandy Greenfield, is boldly setting her own course at the theater that built much of its reputation on reviving classics of American and world theater. Of the eight...
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A Joyful Sound
One of the best seldom-produced musicals, Bells are Ringing, is getting the full bells-and-whistles treatment at the Colonial by the most ridiculously talented cast and crew artistic director Kate...
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Dark Magic
This is the best stage production of Cabaret I’ve seen, or am likely to see, in my lifetime. The Bob Fosse film, still the best film musical ever, rang the death knell for the original Broadway...
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Fires Burn Softly
The Paradise is a jazz club and boarding house owned by Blue (a trumpet player) and located in the Paradise Valley area of Detroit in 1949. The area was also known as Blackbottom due to its fertile...
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