Oct 06

A Young Hero’s Journey: “Dig Down Deep: A Cave Adventure”

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Photo via www.cactusheadpuppets.com/touring-shows

Presented by Puppet Showplace Theater
By CactusHead Puppets
Featuring John Regan and Megan Regan

November 11, 14, & 15, 2026
32 Station Street
Brookline, MA 02445

Review by Maegan Clearwood

BROOKLINE – As artists and arts institutions struggle to secure funding more than ever, Puppet Showplace Theater offers a critically important program: The Incubator for New Work, which provides time, space, and feedback for puppeteers to tinker with new projects.

I was lucky enough to see one of these burgeoning creations, a preview performance of Dig Down Deep: A Cave Adventure by CactusHead Puppets. It was a particularly unique opportunity to see a work-in-progress, because the most valuable feedback in the room came from the children in the front rows. Continue reading →

Oct 03

Come Together, Off-Center: Saath-fest 2026

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Image via SAATh Fest.

Off-Kendrick’s South Asian-American Theater Festival (Saath-fest)
Presented by Off-Kendrick

September 18-20, 2026
The Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal Street
Watertown, MA 02472

Review by Diana Lu

WATERTOWN, Mass. — SAATh is not just an acronym; the name also means “to come together.” The South Asian American Theatre festival therefore is a rare occasion that South Asian storytelling communities all over America can come together and be centered. 

SAATh-fest is the flagship event for Off-Kendrick, a non-profit experimental theater group founded in 2008 by Bengali Bostonians. Kendrick means “center” in Bengali, so Off-Kendrick means off-center in Benglish. In the 18 years since its founding, Off-Kendrick has grown from a small group focusing on Bengali plays about the immigrant experience to an established cultural authority bringing original plays written and performed by artists across the South Asian diaspora to stages in New England. Continue reading →

Oct 02

Everything and Everyone Has A Price: “Covenant”

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Anthony T. Goss as Johnny and Deannah “DRIPP” Blemur as Avery. Photo: Benjamin Rose Photography

Presented by SpeakEast Stage Company
By York Walker
Directed by Dawn M. Simmons
Featuring: Crystin Gilmore, Anthony T. Goss, Sydney Alicia Jackson, Deannah “DRIPP” Blemur, Kayla Sessoms

Sep. 25 through Oct. 17, 2026
Boston Center for the Arts

Critique by Kitty Drexel

TLDR: The cast & crew had a rough night on Wednesday. Covenant is Sinners meets Paranormal. Sorta.

BOSTON — Sometimes, the well-prepared elements of a play don’t meld during a performance. Only the muses know why. That appeared to be the case of the cast and crew of SpeakEasy’s Covenant on Wednesday evening: Actors lost their energy halfway through their lines and looked uneasy on stage, a sound cue misfired, tech persons were accidentally revealed during set changes. To these we say, let she who’s never persisted through a wonky performance cast the first stone. Continue reading →

Sep 29

A Supercut of a Whodunnit: “Shear Madness”

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Photo Credit to Nile Scott Studios.

Presented by Greater Boston Stage company
By Paul Pörtner
Co-Directors: Liv Dumaine and Tyler Rosati
Cast: Alex Leondedis, Mark Lineham, Joseph Marrella, Cheryl L. McMahon, Sarah Morin, Tyler Rosati, Ceit Zweil

September 25 – October 11, 2026
Greater Boston Stage Company
Stoneham, MA 02180

Review by Craig Idlebrook

STONEHAM, Mass. — In order to successfully break the fourth wall in theater, you must first construct a full room.

That’s what makes farcical, audience-participation comedies so tricky to pull off. Casts are often better at either world-building or audience participation, and it’s less common to be strong at both. Luckily, audiences are very forgiving when they get to be in on the joke. Continue reading →

Sep 22

Dear, Dead Days Beyond Recall: “All My Sons”

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Cast members of “All My Sons;” Photo by Benjamin Rose.

Presented by Lyric Stage of Boston
By Arthur Miller
Directed by Scott Edmiston
Compositions by Oleg Smirnov

Sep 23 – Oct 18, 2026
Lyric Stage
140 Clarendon Street
2nd Floor
Boston MA 02116

Critique by Kitty Drexel

TLDR: The Lyric’s production of All My Sons is sad, is triumphant. This family needs therapy. 

BOSTON — Arthur Miller’s All My Sons forces its male characters to face the consequences of their unscrupulous actions as businessmen, patriarchs, and neighbors. As they do, their female counterparts, their wives, sisters and mothers, perform the emotional and other invisible labor necessary to clean up the figurative and literal messes their men have made. This play contains themes such as survivor’s guilt, profit over principles, and the disillusionment of one white nuclear family’s American Dream after WWII, among others. The Lyric Stage’s production, directed by Scott Edmiston, runs in Boston through October 18. 

Each character of All my Sons intertwines with the next. Over three acts, we learn how the cast of characters are intentionally and unintentionally woven into each other’s half truths, secrets, and lies. It begins with self-made businessman Joe Keller (Bill Mootos) and neighborhood scion, a man who prides himself on building a manufacturing business for his nuclear family with his wife Kate (Laurie Marie Duncan) in Ohio. Their first son, Larry, was a pilot who went MIA during the war. Their second son, Chris (Mark Souza), survived as a decorated soldier and works in Joe’s factory. Years later, Joe, Katie and Chris still wrestle with Larry’s disappearance.  Continue reading →

Aug 23

An Infallible System of Interpretation: “Rhinoceros”

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Giamatti and Turturo in “Rhinoceros.” Photo by Hawver and Hall.

Presented by American Repertory Theater
By Eugene Ionesco
Translated by Derek Prouse
Directed by Diane Paulus

Aug. 14 – Sept. 27, 2026
Loeb Drama Center

Digital Playbill

Critique by Kitty Drexel

Runtime: Two hours, including one fifteen-minute intermission.

TLDR; Famous people on stage! Timely politics on stage! Vote the rhinoceri out.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Boston’s arts journalism is awash with news about the American Repertory Theatre’s production of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Rightly so, it’s a grand production worthy of its hype. Director Paulus is finally meeting a political moment as it occurs. She’s invited a grand, New York- and L.A.-based cast to play in Cambridge, MA. (Hello, Bostonian understudies! I appreciate you.) Ionesco’s plays lack universal appeal. Thanks to Derek Prouse’s translation, this charismatic production comes as close as one might get. 

Ionesco’s Rhinoceros dwells under the umbrella of the dramatist movement, the Theatre of the Absurd. TOTA, a 1950s & 1960s American and European theatre movement based on Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), posits the nihilistic/absurdist/existentialist belief that human existence is without meaning or purpose. Rather than do as Camus suggested, which was to find joy in the absurdity, playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco (the Romanian Beckett), Jean Genet (the French Ionesco), and Harold Pinter (the British Genet) decided to be depressed. 

Thanks, Reddit.

Continue reading →

Aug 19

An Ode to 80s Youthful Excess and Idiocy: ROCK OF AGES

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Photo by Paul Lyden

Presented by North Shore Music Theatre 
Book by Chris D’Arienzo
Direction by Kevin P. Hill
Music direction by Peter Leigh-Nilsen
Choreography by Sara Andreas

August 12 – August 23, 2026
North Shore Music Theatre
54 Dunham Rd. 
Beverly, MA 01915 

Review by Craig Idlebrook

BEVERLY, Mass. — You have to hand it to Chris D’Arienzo, the creator of Rock of Ages: he doesn’t shy away from the wincing sexual politics of late-80’s hair metal. A successful production of this play must do more than wink about it; it must embrace it, much like strong productions of Grease did before it.

For better more than for worse, the North Shore Musical Theatre production bearhugs the raw sexuality of this boy-meets-girl story set within the raunchy confines of L.A.’s Sunset Strip in the late 80’s. The skin and the gyrations on stage were enough for the somewhat stoic North Shore Music Theatre to provide a content warning beforehand, before giving the audience permission to sit back and let one’s big hair down. Continue reading →

Aug 10

It’s a Gift to be Phallic: “Pitbull’s Party at the End”

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Presented by Fork & Shoe Theatre Co-op
By Talia Rodriguez
Directed by Leo Leal

August 6-9, 2026
Chelsea Theatre Works

Critique by Kitty Drexel

The show runs approximately 95 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. Venue opens 30 minutes before the show.

TLDR: It’s complicated. There’s good; there’s not great. Keep going.

CHELSEA, Mass. — Pitbull’s Party at the End was an ambitious project debuted by Fork & Shoe Theatre Co-op at Chelsea Theatre Works on Aug. 6. Unfortunately, it closed early due to COVID. We offer our sincere condolences to the cast and crew. Y’all deserve to feel proud of the work you’ve done. Successfully producing an independent show is a minor miracle in these dark times.  

Pitbull’s Party at the End’s summary on the Fork & Shoe website: It’s 2042 and a hurricane threatens to wipe Miami off the map. Meanwhile, Mr. Worldwide (Carlos Fruzzetti, charismatic and funny) is performing his last ever New Year’s Eve concert, the Phallic brothers (David Feit Mann, Scott Schaeffer, Eli Bondar) are planning the business deal of a lifetime, and an intergenerational Cuban-Jewish family (Paola Ferrer, David Kleinman, Sophia Yael Koevary, Audrey Molina) must bridge their differences to survive the apocalypse.

Pitbull’s Party suffers from too many storylines and too many messages carrying equal importance. This one 95-minute play is about the ethnic cleansing of multiple societies, our global climate disaster, Jewish Cuban culture, billionaires’ atrocities, intergenerational queer identity, anticapitalist philosophy, and the Grammy-winning American rapper, singer, songwriter, and “actor” Armando Christian Pérez, aka Mr. 305, aka Mr. Worldwide, aka Miami’s bald zaddy, Pitbull. Carrying that many subplots in one play requires careful threading.  Continue reading →

Aug 05

We are all just prisoners here of our own device: “M: Refractions from an Evil Act”

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Grant and Hertzberg in “M.” Photo credit: Morganna Becker.

Presented by Exiled Theatre Company 
Written by James Wilkinson
Directed by Joe Juknievich
Starring: Julia Hertzberg, Sydney Grant, Tim Hoover and Peter Tone

July 31-Aug 9, 2026
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

Critique by Kitty Drexel

TLDR: M is a work in progress; the acting is top-notch.

BOSTON — M: Refractions from An Evil Act includes English and French dialogue. There are no subtitles. (My French is abysmal.) My impression is that we aren’t meant to understand the French dialogue in M. This helps us sympathize with M, the character… And hopefully anyone thrust into a hairy situation involving language skills they don’t possess. Including ourselves.

Playwright Wilkinson creates a comprehensive world within a David Lynchian hotel in which his characters eke out their fraught existence. He shows and tells its rules through consistent repetition. Then, à la Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, Wilkinson shows us what happens if characters don’t obey those rules: Characters collapse, disappear and reappear, alcohol is replaced with more alcohol… and the maid still comes to vacuum the guest room.  Continue reading →

Aug 05

Techno Escapism in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

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Brooks Reeves (Robin Starveling), Michael Broadhurst* (Francis Flute), Paul Melendy* (Nick Bottom), Karen MacDonald* (Petra Quince), Alex Leondedis (Snug), and John Kuntz* (Snout). Photo Credit: Nile Scott Studios.

Presented by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Steven Maler
Choreography by John Lam
Featuring: De’Lon Grant, Nora Eschenheimer, Nick Cearley, Paul Melendy, Meghan Carey, Annika Burley, Jaime José Hernandez, Jack Greenberg

July 22 – August 9, 2026
Commonwealth Shakespeare Company
Free on the Boston Common

Critique by Maegan Clearwood

BOSTON — I have been a Shakespeare on the Common groundling since moving to Boston four years ago. Summer after summer, I am drawn to the romanticism of outdoor theater: the quieting transformation from dawn to dusk, the unpredictable interference of the natural world, the crowd of Bostonians from so many walks of life, all gathered on the Commons for an evening of free art. Continue reading →