Short camps for a long summer: Want to avoid throwing that Disney movie on again so you can get some work done at home? With the prospect of a long summer ahead, Live Arts has good news for parents of small children. At Treasure Trunk Mini Camps, kids can play games, make crafts, and read […]
Remember live music? Us, too. There’s reason to be extra grateful for recorded music right now (and for all the artists streaming sets into our living rooms), but it’s not the same as packing into a whatever-sized room with a bunch of other people to hear some tunes played just for you. Sweating, swaying, swooning, […]
Acting out: No theater? No audience? No problem. Live Arts turns crisis into creativity with 30in30. Every evening in May, members of the theater’s vast volunteer staff will participate in livestreams of plays from the organization’s last three decades for a retrospective that interim artistic director Jeremy Duncan Pape calls “our gift to the community.” […]
Mother’s big helper: One silver lining of our new stay-at-home society is that it’s provided hours of quality family time. Hours and hours—with no end in sight. Luckily, Live Arts’ Online Treasure Trunk Theater offers parents some guilt-free virtual assistance from Edwina Herring. New stories, [...]
What do you do when structures fail? When you did everything right, you played by the rules, yet the safety you thought you’d shored up for the future disappears with a twist of fate? In The Humans, a Tony Award-winning comedy-drama by playwright Stephan Karam, characters wrestle to find peace [...]
Rescue zoo: Sherry Wickman is on the way to achieving her professional dreams when she moves back home and faces a fruitless job search and the family dynamics that set her on the path to becoming a therapist. Relatives retreat into their anxiety and, as they struggle, a tiger escapes from the [...]
Grand stage: A Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers collaboration would appear to be a sure bet for any Broadway investor, yet 1965’s Do I Hear A Waltz? fell far short of critical acclaim. The redeeming factor is that it caused Sondheim to only accept projects where he could write both the [...]
By Nina Richards To Micah Kessel, assumption is the enemy of empathy. Empathy is the realization that each person has different, and equally valid, experiences and emotions that inform our every move. Which is why Kessel, Kelley Van Dilla, Adrienne Dent, and Annie Temmink have created an [...]
Our ability to look at art—to see color, shape, texture—comes from light. We’ll spare you an in-depth science lesson, but most basically, light reflects off objects and into the eye. Cells in the retina (at the back of the eye) convert light into electrical impulses, which the optic nerve sends [...]
Ring true: Boxer Jack Johnson became the first African American world heavyweight champion, and at the height of the Jim Crow era he was “the most famous and the most notorious African American on Earth,” according to documentarian Ken Burns. Directed by multi-faceted artist and C-VILLE [...]
Hindsight is 1616: It’s a battle to save the legacy of William Shakespeare when the Bard’s mates go on a mad scramble to gather up his disparate writings in Lauren Gunderson’s The Book of Will. At the time of his death in 1616, Shakespeare was well-off and popular, but had his friends John [...]
In Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, Dean Cindy Wreen is fed up with a lot of things: her tiny college’s financial difficulties, plans to close an obscure natural history museum, and monogamy, to name a few. While her New England town battles to save a historically inaccurate woolly [...]
By Leslie M. Scott-Jones Walking into the downstage theater at Live Arts, the sounds are familiar. Vocal warm-ups have begun, and musical director Kristen Baltes shouts from the balcony that this is “real life,” signaling to the actors to fill the space with their voices (not easy to do in that [...]
Ti Ames loves William Shakespeare. Or rather, Ames loves the plays of William Shakespeare. It’s a love that started when Ames played a fairy in The Tempest at Live Arts at age 9, and it grew when, at 16, Ames became the first black actor to win the English-Speaking Union National Shakespeare [...]
Imagine Romeo and Juliet in an urban, 1950s setting. You’re probably thinking of West Side Story—now replace that play’s tragic elements with absurdist comedy the way only John Waters could write it, and you get Cry-Baby: The Musical, a stage adaptation of the Waters rom-com. Featuring the [...]
Piecing together a Jenga-style puzzle of arranged marriages, mistaken identities and wicked ways, David Ives’ adaptation of The Liar is a cleverly constructed ride through a plot riddled with cutting banter, silliness, jealousy and lies, lies and more lies. The villainous, witty Dorante (Mark [...]
In case you forgot why people still put on pants and leave the house in order to partake in live theater (as opposed to Netflix-ing their way to human-sized sinkholes on the couch), allow Live Arts’ production of Hand to God to spell it out for you. Full-frontal nudity! Cursing in church! Legit [...]
A stage representative of a beautifully cared for home lights up, as does the face of the youngest version of Alison Bechdel, played by Violet Craghead-Way, as she begins to sing. I had only heard about Fun Home. I had never seen it (or listened to the music). I walked into Live Arts’ [...]
When I was a tween writing “X-Files” fan fiction, I never suspected my interest in storytelling would lead to an actual career as a writer. But then I enrolled in the creative writing program at a performing arts high school—and discovered my creative power. Dozens of local arts organizations [...]
Enter: a lively dinner party. Lots of crosstalk. Women in a startling array of historical costumes. There’s Isabella Bird, a 19th-century globe-trotter and well-educated author. There’s Joan the Pope, a ninth-century intellectual who lived as a man and briefly became the pope. There’s Dull [...]
The next time you use the Water Street and Second Street crosswalk, look in the Live Arts window. There’s a light on in the lobby—the theater’s ghost light. It’s small and casts yellow light from a transparent glass shade, and, according to superstition, keeps ghosts from haunting the theater [...]
Adult identical twins Pip and Twig live an insular, codependent existence. Wearing identical pajamas, they wake in their shared bed at the same time every morning and eat identical breakfasts before going about their daily childlike, tandem routine, clothed in identical dress-and-sweater [...]
Told by a charismatic troupe of actors, Pippin is the story of a prince who desperately wants to impress his father, King Charles. The Leading Player convinces Pippin to betray the King instead, and his life goes hopelessly awry. Pippin dreams of love, family and a happy ending—but Leading [...]