Theatre 
A Singer’s Notes 25: He That Hath Ears to Hear, Let Him Hear(0)
In The Crucible, the Proctors sit at their plain table with John’s brief failing between them. He is a good man. He makes every situation better, more reasonable. He is a natural man. The land is his, and he is the land’s. Everything is in the quietness. She is the quietness. Christopher Innvar with a voice which lurches sadly, breaks the silence. Kim Stauffer, with a face barren and wide, makes cautious answer, and holds the distance between them in her hands.
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Arthur Miller’s The Crucible directed by Julianne Boyd – a Triumph for the Barrington Stage Company
The Barrington Stage Company excels in several different areas — modern classics, musicals, and brainy little contemporary plays — and is plagued only by one persistent flaw, the policy of using excessive amplification even in the diminutive Stage 2 theatre. Fortunately, that was absent in this performance, and all I have to talk about is theatre.
Omar Sangare: from Dialogue One at Williams to United Solo (usolo) on Forty-Second Street, with an Account of D1 2009 and Jonah Bokaer
Omar Sangare founded the Dialogue One Festival for solo theater in 2007 at Williams College, where he had just assumed a position as Assistant Professor of theater studies. Before that, he had built up a stellar reputation as a writer, poet, singer, and actor in his native Poland, receiving a Ph.D. from the Theater Academy in Warsaw, where he studied with the great film director, Andrzej Wajda, among others. His many talents came together in solo theater, a field in which he is well-known in Central Europe and at international festivals. He was voted Best in Acting by the New York International Fringe Festival in 1997 for his one-man drama, True Theater Critic. The same year Sangare was invited to the Jerzy Grotowski Theater in Wroclaw, Poland, where he won four prizes at the Theater Festival. The monodrama was presented in Poland, Canada, England, Ukraine, Germany, and the United States, where it recently received the Best Performance Award at the San Francisco Fringe Festival.
A Singer’s Notes 24: Words and Music
One Christmas my magic daughter gave me a picture of a baboon. Above it she wrote Prospero’s valedictory line: “I’ll drown my book.” The animal had an expression of imponderable grief on its face. Words are exclusively human. But could it be said that animals sing? Music sets words free, back to their primal origin, leaping into the heart. Music is a language of knowing, of certainty. It has the raw truth of the baboon’s face. Maybe Prospero, whose name signifies hope, begins to sing when the book is drowned and the grief is past.
More in this category
- A Singer’s Notes 23: Three from the Bard
- Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at the Apollo Theatre
- Spur of the Moment at the Royal Court Theatre
- La Bête by David Hirson at the Comedy Theatre, London
- Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane at The Young Vic
- Our Town Is More Than Ever: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at the Williamstown Theatre Festival
