Boston Spotlight: November 2006

Pay no attention to that dull, gray scene outside. Area theaters are bursting with light and life — tragic, comic, and every permutation in between.

Boston audiences will have a chance to catch up with local scribe David Lindsay-Abaire’s recent Broadway hit Rabbit Hole, directed by John Tillinger, at the Huntington (November 3-December 3). Donna Bullock plays Becca, a late-in-life parent forced to cope with the unthinkable; Jordan Lage is her equally afflicted husband; Geneva Carr is her irresponsible sister Izzy; and Tony Award nominee Maureen Anderman is Nat, Becca’s down-to-earth mother.

Boston Lyric Opera launches its 30th season with Madama Butterfly (November 3-14), conducted by the Boston Pops’ mediagenic Keith Lockhart and starring Kelly Kaduce, a locally trained talent who has toured in Baz Luhrmann’s La Boheme. Shoring up the classical front, the Bank of America Celebrity Series brings the Kirov Ballet to the Wang Center in Swan Lake (November 9-12). Also, the small but astute Intermezzo Opera company resurrects Benjamin Britten’s rarely staged Noh-based Curlew River (November 17-19).

Boston is psyched to be part of the Twelve Angry Men national tour, directed by Roundabout Theatre’s Scott Ellis and alighting at the Shubert (November 17-19). Jury foreman George Wendt has a huge local following from his work on Cheers, and Emmy Award winner Richard Thomas wows with a radical reinterpretation of the role of renegade juror made famous on film by Henry Fonda.

Two Obie-winning hits make their New England debuts at the Boston Center for the Arts. SpeakEasy Stage introduces Kirsten Childs’ musical The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin (November 17-December 19), and Boston Theatre Works — with the help of eight game youngsters — takes on Kyle Jarrow’s A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant (November 24-December 16).

As further alterna-holiday fare, in the Ridiculous Theatre tradition, the Gold Dust Orphans present Silent Night of the Lambs (November 30-December 23), a frightening portrait of “public enemy number one, a.k.a. Santa Claus — a man who, after hundreds of years of back-breaking public service, has been driven to devour more than just a plate of stale cookies. For wholesome family fare, there’s always Avner The Eccentric’s Exceptions to Gravity at the Lyric Stage Company (November 24-December 23).

The Nora Theatre Company brings a New England premiere of A.R. Gurney’s futurist comedy Screen Play — well received at New York’s Flea Theatre last season — to the Boston Playwrights Theatre (November 2-19). In this parodic projection to the year 2015, blue-state Buffalo (Gurney’s birthplace) stands in for Casablanca.
Over in Cambridge, the American Repertory Theatre, in concert with the avant-garde Dutch company Toneelgroep Amsterdam, presents a staged adaptation of Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (November 25-December 17). Expect a live rock score by Andy Moor of The Ex, aerial acrobatics, and “huge columns of flowing sand that link heaven and earth.”

Its home base of Chelsea, with a large and growing immigrant population, struck TheatreZone as an ideal locale in which to revive Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (November 10-December 10): the multiracial cast, led by Jeff Gill, themselves represent 10 different countries of origin.

Stoneham Theatre is reprising its holiday crowd-pleaser from last season, A Christmas Story (November 25 – December 23), and Gloucester Stage is doing Alan Bennett’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows (November 30-December 17).

Cape Cod will be eerily quiet from here on out, but Cape Rep is mounting Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo as its last hurrah (November 2-21).

Providence’s Trinity Rep presents its 30th-anniversary version of Dickens’ popular A Christmas Carol, this year to feature lifesize Scrooge-lookalike puppets and an eerie/innocent “musical soundscape” created by a children’s choir (November 17-December 31). In neighboring Pawtucket, the Gamm Theatre presents David Sedaris’ deliciously seditious double feature (November 24 -December 24): Steve Kidd plays the Macy’s elf-in-training Crumpet in The Santaland Diaries, and Casey Seymour the beset homemaker composing a hilariously parodic holiday newsletter in Season’s Greetings.