Boston Metro Spotlight: December 2006
Let’s face it; it’s tough to compete with the sales at the mall during the holiday season. But several companies are smartly using this month to try out experimental new work likely to appeal to those who aren’t interested in this week’s blue light special.
The Dresden Dolls (aka Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione, local artistes turned world-famous rock stars) are the moving force behind The Onion Cellar at ART’s Zero Arrow black box (December 9 – January 13). In this punk cabaret inspired by Gunter Grass’s 1949 novel The Tin Drum, The Dolls and a handful of ART vets will serve as emotional facilitators in an imaginary cafe where audiences, numbed by an unending stream of disasters, congregate to peel onions and let it all out. If it’s laughter you’re after, ART’s mainstage will be hosting the U.S. premiere of Ridiculusmus’ highly acclaimed two-man adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest (December 21-January 14).
Boston University School of Theatre launches a new play development program with a workshop run of Ronan Noone’s latest, Brendan, at the Boston Center for the Arts (December 7-17). The latest work by this young Irish-born, BU-minted playwright is about an Irish immigrant in Boston contemplating a switch in citizenship. Meanwhile, BU’s Playwrights Theatre hosts TYG Productions’ Family Beef: Lovers Edition (December 11-13), a compendium of short plays about romance gone wrong and “tribal conflicts.”
MIT and Underground Railway Theater are collaborating on a free reading of On Ego (December 4-5), co-authored by British playwright Mick Gordon and neuropsychologist Paul Broks. Based on Broks’ book, Into the Silent Land, a meditation on the nature of the brain, the script posits a neuroscientist who, after a teleportation mishap, finds he has two selves: Which is real, and, perhaps more important, how does the brain go about constructing a self in the first place?
The funniest thing to be seen in Boston is Ryan Landry’s inspired amalgam Silent Night of the Lambs at The Machine (through December 23), in which an earnest young doe-detective must consult with a jailed and disgraced Santa — he got tired of mere milk and cookies — to track down a serial deerslayer.
Traveling shows in town include the perennially popular Stomp at the Colonial (December 5-17), The Radio City Christmas Spectacular at the Wang Center (December 7-31), and the genre-bending dance company Pilobolus at the Shubert (December 8-10).
Out beyond the city proper, the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly embarks on its lavish eighteenth annual A Christmas Carol (December 1-24), and Watertown’s New Repertory Theatre contends with its own A Christmas Carol (December 10-24). New Rep is also adding a few holiday lagniappes: local fave John Kuntz reprises David Sedaris’ hilarious The Santaland Diaries (December 20-31) and The Love Show, a family-oriented circus/vaudeville/burlesque pastiche (December 28-29). Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell is sidelining seasonal fare to present the New England premiere of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s latest comic condensation, Completely Hollywood (Abridged) (December 7-17).
Out in the Berkshires, the venerable Berkshire Theatre Festival opens its doors in winter for the first time to give actor/director Eric Hill a shot at Scrooge in BTF’s first Christmas Carol (December 9-23). Heading farther north, Northern Stage, a professional company in Bellows Falls, Vermont has lured a former Broadway Old Deuteronomy, Ken Prymus, for its production of Cats (December 6-31).
Finally, the biggest buzz in the region surrounds a rare stage appearance by TV superstar William Peterson in Conor McPherson’s A Dublin Carol at Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island (December 1-January 7). Petersen has had a distinguished stage career, and the play — about a Dublin undertaker’s assistant, taking stock of his sorry life one Christmas Eve — promises to put his talents to optimal use.
