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 mammoth exhibition from a dark fate, […]
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 room). Seated in the […]
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 Competition in 2012. […]
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 [...]
This week Live Arts opens its season by inviting the public into an intimate theater in the round to observe the interior lives of family and friends in Edward Albee’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, A Delicate Balance. Director Fran Smith says it is an eloquent work that “centers around [...]
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 [...]
Since 2003, Bree Luck has risen through the ranks at Live Arts—first as a volunteer, performing and directing, and then serving as education director. Most recently, Luck was the theater’s interim managing artistic director. This month, the Henry, Virginia, native—also a former Georgian, New [...]
Widely considered one of the greatest American plays of the 20th century, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was the first to hit the trifecta with a Tony Award, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The story centers around the broken dreams and despairing family of [...]
There’s something a bit off about The Realistic Joneses. “Maybe it’s me,” you think at first. You’re sitting so close to the middle-aged couple you’re practically on top of them. She’s talking about the beauty of the night air and the owl she can hear in the distance. He’s staring down at hands [...]
Merging the profound with the trivial, Will Eno’s absurdist script for The Realistic Joneses plays out like a tough-topic sketch comedy. When new neighbors arrive, two couples get to know each other through unlikely circumstances that bring them together and push them apart in unexpected ways. [...]
In a new book due out in August, In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micro-Meteorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters, Norwegian musician and amateur scientist Jon Larsen explains how it’s possible for anyone with a microscope to find cosmic debris. He estimates that more than 100 metric tons of [...]
The teenager-loaded cast and crew of Peter and the Starcatcher “keep the grown-ups on our toes and bring fantastic ideas” according Live Arts’ Bree Luck. The production wields credits for more than 45 community members and offers a special artistic collaboration between apprentice and mentor in [...]
In Stefanie Zadravec’s Electric Baby, a mysterious moon floats over six characters who navigate through three stories that connect after a car accident. Cast members dig into the depths of sorrow, proffer folk remedies and search for peace throughout the dark comedy. Through November 5. $20-25, [...]
Live Arts community theater will be going through a couple of changes in the next few months. The Live Arts Board of Directors announced this afternoon the resignations of Executive Director Matt Joslyn, who has been with the organization for six and a half years, and Artistic Director Julie [...]
Howard Pape spent his next-to-last day alive installing a real tree—upside down, so that its roots would be the branches—for the set he’d helped design for Live Arts’ upcoming production of To Kill a Mockingbird, according to director Fran Smith. Performing such formidable tasks for the [...]