by Roseann Cane As Barrington Stage Company‘s production of Into the Woods opens, we’re presented with a group of fairy-tale familiar characters, including Cinderella (Amanda Robles); Jack (the Beanstalk climber, played by Clay Singer); Little Red Riding Hood (Dorcas Leung), and Rapunzel (Anna Tobin). A dapper narrator (Thom Sesma) draws…
by Roseann Cane If “Call me Ishmael” is the most famous opening sentence of an English-language novel, surely “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” is a very close second. The first, of course,…
by Macey Levin In 1945, Tennessee Williams gave us The Glass Menagerie which earned him a number of awards and propelled him into his ranking as a major American playwright. His canon of plays led by A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot…
by Barbara Waldinger Henrik Ibsen is a tough act to follow. At the end of his 1879 masterpiece, A Doll’s House, audiences gasped as Nora Helmer left her husband and three children, delivering what George Bernard Shaw famously called “the door slam heard around the world,” presumably never to return.…
by Roseann Cane Typhoid fever, a life-threatening bacterial illness, is still fairly common throughout the world, with about 5,700 cases developing annually in the U.S. Today typhoid fever can be prevented and treated with antibiotics, but at the turn of the 20th Century, typhoid fever was often akin to a death…
by Roseann Cane Written as a soul soother for his beloved England, which was recovering from The Blitz and devastated by the continuing casualties of World War II, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit was a rip-roaring success. From its first performance on London’s West End in 1941 (where it ran for a record-breaking 1,997 performances), through…
The four critics who review for BerkshireOnStage.com – Gail M. Burns, Roseann Cane, Macey Levin, and Barbara Waldinger – have each listed their favorite regional theatre productions of the past calendar year. Because for the most part we all see and review different shows, there was no sense trying to…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2009 “To be, or not to be: that is the question:Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;No more; and by a…
