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Posts Tagged ‘Williamstown Theatre Festival’

Williamstown Theatre Festival adds Tyne Daly, Susie Essman, Lili Taylor to Summer’s Hot Shows List [Berkshire on Stage]

Monday, May 14th, 2012

Williamstown Theatre Festival Artistic Director Jenny Gersten has announced additional casting for the 2012 Summer Season. A host of Williamstown Theatre Fesival veterans and talented newcomers including Becky Ann Baker, Marylouise Burke, Tyne Daly, Brandon Victor Dixon, Alison Fraser, Heather Lind, Amy Spanger, Jeremy Strong, Lili Taylor and many more, will take the stage during the Festival’s 58thSeason.

As previously announced, the complete 2012 Williamstown Theatre Festival season runs from June 26 – August 19, 2012 and includes Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a Preview Production of the new musical Far From Heaven, and a new translation of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country on the Main Stage, with Lucy Boyle’s The Blue Deep, Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, and Katori Hall’s WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! on the Nikos Stage. The season will also include a special workshop production of David Byrne’s Here Lies Love, which will play at nearby MASS MoCa.

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.

Tags: Berkshire On Stage, Larry Murray, Williamstown Theatre Festival
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Williamstown Theatre Festival announces 2012 Season [Berkshire on Stage]

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

David Hyde Pierce (l) and Jessica Stone will direct two plays in 2012.

This morning, the news of an exciting summer of theatre was made by Jenny Gersten, artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Fielding questions from reporters and VIP’s gathered in the Williams College Faculty Club, six plays were announced, with one more still being formalized and to be announced later.

As in her first season, there will be a total of seven productions, three on the main stage and four on the Nikos stage. The performing season will run from June 26 to August 19 one week shorter than in the past to enable the transition back to college use to take place more smoothly.

For their Summer 2012 season, there will be a world premiere by Oliver Award-winning Mountaintop playwright Katori Hall, plus works by Oscar Wilde, Neil Simon and Ivan Turgenev. A pair of productions will enable Berkshire audiences to see another side of the actors David Hyde Pierce and Jessica Stone – they will showcase their work as directors for the two popular plays

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.

Tags: Berkshire On Stage, Larry Murray, Williamstown Theatre Festival
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Musical “Far from Heaven” and Drama “The Blue Deep” Announced for 2012 Williamstown Theatre Festival [Berkshire on Stage]

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Williamstown Theatre Festival at the '62 Center of Williams College.

From our News Desk: Let the snows fly, they don’t bother residents of the Berkshires since visions of summer shows and wonderful theatrical stars performing at the 2012 Williamstown Theatre Festival are dancing in their heads. Good news has arrived.

Jenny Gersten announced today the first two of her Main Stage and Nikos Stage productions for the 2012 Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) season, the Festival’s 58th Season and second under Ms. Gersten’s leadership. A new style “Preview Production” format will be used for the first time for Far From Heaven, a new musical which has a book by Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out), an original score by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie (Grey Gardens) and directed by Michael Greif (Rent; WTF’s Three Sisters).

It is based on the Oscar naminated film which chronicled the story of a 1950s housewife who discovers her husband is gay. Julianne Moore starred opposite Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert and Patricia Clarkson in the film.

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.

Tags: Berkshire On Stage, Larry Murray, Williamstown, Williamstown Theatre Festival
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Massive Loss as Irene’s Flood Destroys Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Scenery and Props Building [Berkshire on Stage]

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

The Wlliamstown Theatre Festival's new storage space and scenery shop.

On August 30, the final day of the 2011 season, just as they were carefully closing up the shop for the winter, Mother Nature, in the form of Tropical Storm Irene, paid a seriously unwelcome visit to the Willliamstown Theatre Festival’s (WTF) new storage space and scenery shop.

The nearby Hoosic River breached its banks and filled their freshly constructed and inventoried prop storage space with ten feet of muddy water. While the WTF says some items may be salvageable, the majority of the stock – collected over half a century – is damaged and will have to be discarded. Loss and damage is estimated to be in the six figure range.

This was the second disaster in 2011. Previously the WTF scene shop was located in the Delftree building, a 19th-century mill in nearby North Adams that also served as a storage facility for 57 years worth of furniture and props. In February of this year, heavy snow load caused the building’s roof to collapse in several spots, including the space leased by WTF. The building was declared unsafe and as a result the WTF was not able to go in and assess the damage until early May.

Click to read the rest of this story at Berkshire on Stage.

Tags: Berkshire On Stage, Hurricane Irene, Larry Murray, North Adams, Williamstown Theatre Festival
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LIVE: “Ten Cents a Dance” No Bargain @ Williamstown Theatre Festival [Berkshire on Stage]

Monday, August 15th, 2011

Donna McKechnie, Malcolm Gets, Lauren Molina. (photo by T. Charles Erickson.)

There were five of us who met up at the first matinee of Ten Cents a Dance at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, all musical fans, and the reaction was that two loved it, three hated it. Trying to find something positive to balance my feeling that it is an over-produced “Snooze-ical” is a challenge.

In what the publicists describe as the “American Premiere,” the director John Doyle first staged this song-cycle, featuring nearly 30 Rodgers and Hart tunes and a wisp of a narrative, in 2002 at the Watermill Playhouse in West Berkshire, England. Both that production and this could be accurately described as a series of the very nice songs of Rodgers and Hart performed very nicely.

Director Doyle has gained quite a reputation for engaging performers who not only can do vocals, but also can double as the orchestra. They alternate their vocals with intermittent turns on the sax, trumpet, drums and strings. Doyle has done this to superb effect with both Sweeney Todd and Company.

Click here to read the rest of this at Berkshire on Stage.

Tags: Berkshire On Stage, Larry Murray, Ten Cents a Dance, Williamstown, Williamstown Theatre Festival
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LIVE: Bess Wohl’s “Touch(ed)” – an Elaborate Producation of a Slight Play at Williamstown Theatre Festival [Berkshire on Stage]

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Merritt Wever, Lisa Joyce, Michael Chernus in Touch(ed) (Photos by T. Charles Erickson)

The first season under Jenny Gersten has seen a succession of handsome shows with stunning, even lavish scenic design. So it is tempting to say that the best thing about Touch(ed) (like the earlier Three Hotels) is its sets and lighting.

That would be true, but snarky.

Touch(ed) has more going for it than a gigantic set that rolls away to make room for the final scene. This new play by the promising young writer Bess Wohl opened this week at the smaller Nikos Theatre during the Williamstown Theatre Festival. It is the theatre that has traditionally been the place where the Festival’s new works are debuted. All that changed this year with the arrival of the organization’s new artistic director, Jenny Gersten. She has turned the tables on tradition.

The traditional A Streetcar Named Desire opened on the “experimental” stage while the intimate Three Hotels took the main stage with its gigantic McSets. The Nikos sold out with the radically updated Tennessee Williams classic, while the more contemporary Three Hotels by John Robin Baitz left thousands of seats unsold. For many who treasure the WTF, this seemed to be wrong-headed. But Gersten has a rationale for these moves, and I suspect that the unsaid part of this arrangement is not only key to her quest for new and upcoming writers, directors and actors, but also for those hard to find “new” audiences. We will get to that towards the end of this review and analysis.

Click to read the rest of this story at Berkshire on Stage.

Tags: Berkshire On Stage, Larry Murray, Touch(ed), Williamstown, Williamstown Theatre Festival
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LIVE: “She Stoops To Conquer” is Flawless at Williamstown Theatre Festival [Berkshire on Stage]

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

Brooks Ashmanskas in a scene from She Stoops To Conquer at Williamstown Theatre Festival (photos by T. Charles Erickson)

It appears that nothing inspires Nicholas Martin’s creativity more than a cherished theatrical chestnut. Last year he staged a fresh but honest Our Town, and this Summer, it is the 238-year-old Oliver Goldsmith play, She Stoops to Conquer. The first warmed our hearts, the latter tickles our ribs.

Gathering his family of actors around him, Martin has brought this romantic comedy of manners in the Eighteenth Century to a brilliant sheen, with more laughs than I have ever heard this play inspire in the past. He has raised it to the level of farce and satire. Yet it has a literary and theatrical fidelity that maintains its place as a classic piece of theatre. It is all the foregoing in one exquisite evening of theatre.

This is the kind of play that is a perfect fit for Williamstown: sophisticated and witty, but not at all dry. She Stoops to Conquer has a large cast of sixteen who engage in a wild weekend of manipulation and matchmaking. It all revolves around the daughter of the Hardcastles, (Mia Barron) being proffered for a marriage to Charles, the son of the Marlows (Jon Patrick Walker).

Click to read the rest of this story at Berkshire on Stage.

Tags: Berkshire On Stage, Larry Murray, Williamstown, Williamstown Theatre Festival
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LIVE: “A Doll’s House @ Williamstown Theatre Fesival [Berkshire on Stage]

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

A Doll's House @ Williamstown Theatre Festival

This unusual staging of A Doll’s House might work on film. Done that way we might have been better able to see it, hear it and enjoy it. For example, in the scene above you see the children playing in the kitchen. This photo shows more of Sol Sutter(l) and Rose Sutter(r) than I was able to see from my seat.

So it seems to me that the audience and their needs were clearly an afterthought in this annoyingly staged production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The heavy handed symbolism began the moment you entered the theatre and encountered the vast and complex set in which the action would take place. It was more like a maze with room after room growing like tumors off the main living room.

Perhaps David Korins, the set designer, meant the labyrinthic warren of rooms to represent Nora’s journey to her own center and back again out into the world. This is the life passage the classic character of Nora Helmer (Lily Rabe) takes in the play.

Click to read the rest of this story at Berkshire on Stage.

Tags: A Doll's House, Berkshire On Stage, Larry Murray, Williamstown, Williamstown Theatre Festival
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