Boston Metro Spotlight: June 2010

Scarcely has the weather begun to spike, and already the annual diaspora is under way. City theaters are mostly going on hiatus as the action moves out of town.

In the city of Boston, you can still catch celebrated songbird Kelli O’Hara and Jason Danieley celebrating An Evening of Cole Porter with the Boston Pops (June 9-11).

Fringe efforts persist in the form of Contemporary Theater of Boston’s edgy staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Plaza Theater (June 2-19) and Counter-Productions take on Yasmina Reza’s Art at the Factory Theater (June 4-20). Also at the Factory, Mill 6 concocts The T Plays (June 23-27), seven pop-up dramas written and developed, in the course of three days, on public transportation.

In the suburbs, Waltham’s Reagle Players have nabbed star Rachel York to play the witch in Into the Woods (June 17-27). At Watertown’s New Rep, Mary Callanan portrays Sophie Tucker: Last of the Red Hot Mamas (June 24 – July 11). The Wellesley Summer Theatre Company joins the Horton Foote bandwagon with The Trip to Bountiful (June 3-27), and Gloucester Stage has assembled a stellar cast — including Lindsay Crouse and Paula Plum — for Alan Ayckbourn’s Table Manners, part of his Norman Conquests trilogy (June 17 – July 3).

The Berkshire season begins with a bang — or rather the thud of falling bodies — when Harriet Harris and Jeff McCarthy star in Barrington’s Stage Company’s Sweeney Todd (June 17 – July 17). BSC’s Stage 2 rehosts a hit from last season, Mark St. Germain’s Freud’s Last Session with Martin Rayner and Mark H. Dold (June 22 – July 3).

The Berkshire Theatre Festival presents Patrick Meyers’s K2 (June 17 – July 3), a literal cliffhanger of a thriller starring Greg Keller and Tim McGeever. While that’s playing in the Unicorn Theater, the mainstage will be given over to another emotionally fraught two-hander: Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, starring Julie Reiber and Paul Anthony Stewart (June 22 – July 10).

The Williamstown Theatre Festival kicks in soon after with Judy Gold’s latest monologue, It’s Jewdy’s Show: My Life as a Sitcom (June 23 – July 4), on the Nikos Stage, and, on the mainstage, outgoing artistic director Nicholas Martin’s long-cherished dream of an all-male rendition of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (June 30 – July 11), featuring Christopher Fitzgerald as Pseudolus.

Cape Cod is already in full swing, what with Varla Jean Merman (freshly endowed with an Eliot Norton award) appearing as The Loose Chanteuse at Provincetown’s Art House Theatre (June 4 – September 4). She’ll be accompanied by porn star “Gus Mattox” – aka Tom Judson, whose own solo musical comedy, Canned Ham, will also enjoy a summer-long run (June 6 – August 26). The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre offers the New England premiere of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s dark comedy Colorado (June 3 – July 3), about the whacked-out family of a vicious teen beauty queen gone AWOL.

The Cape Playhouse in Dennis opens its 83rd season with Stephanie Zimbalist starring as Katherine Hepburn in Tea at Five (June 7-19) and Howard McGillin in The 39 Steps (June 21 – July 3).

At Rhode Island’s almost as venerable Theatre by the Sea, Mitzi Hamilton directs A Chorus Line (June 2-20); she played Val in London and on Broadway. Next up is Cady Huffman in the title role of Hello, Dolly! (June 23 – July 11).