8 hours Ago By Jed Gottlieb
Over the last year, Boston theater has reminded audiences what America forgot. Or has yet to learn. It was a season about justice, unjust power dynamics, wealth, redemption, and beauty.
And it ranged from ballet to drama to big Broadway musicals. Playwright Kimberly Belflower’s work takes a hard, biting look at “The Crucible” and our modern moment. The narrative is constructed around a group of 11th graders studying Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials at their Georgia high school.
Through class, “The Crucible,” and the realities of a contemporary high school experience, friends Beth, Raelynn, Nell, Ivy, and Shelby find their own definitions of friendship, feminism, and repressive, destructive gender-based power dynamics. As grounded as it is in a specific place, “John Proctor is the Villain” serves as a reminder that these unjust, unrelenting power dynamics are ubiquitous. They run from 17th century Salem to rural Georgia to Boston.
Meta-musical “A Strange Loop” tells the story of Usher, a Black, queer writer penning a musical about a Black, queer writer penning a musical about a Black, queer writer. Actor Kai Clifton, who played Usher in the production, is also a Black, queer writer. Michael R.
Jackson’s work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 and two Tonys in 2022 including best musical. The success is impressive considering how outside the mainstream “A Strange Loop” is — the action mainly takes place in Usher’s mind as the character acts as an usher at “The Lion King,” a job Jackson had for four years. The twists within twists are funny, profane, sad, and sublime.
As Jay Gatsby’s world crumbles around him, he tells his lone friend Nick Carraway, “I’ve murdered pieces of myself to stand on this marble.” Stand on this marble. Drive a Rolls Royce.
Throw lavish, absurd parties in a lavish, absurd mansion. Like its source novel, ART’s “Gatsby” is obsessed with money: Who has it, who doesn’t, how they spend it, how they got it, how do they get more of it. It’s a musical that drips with Jazz Age debauchery and influencer hedonism of today.
“Gatsby” should go to Broadway and make a lot of money. It should also make Broadway audiences think about what pieces of themselves they’re willing to murder to stand on an Italian Carrara marble staircase. “Les Misérables” is often mocked for its sweep.
The cast is huge. The score rises up like a mountain range. The sets, lights, fog (so much fog!) carry the audience from 1800s French chain gangs to brothels to the bridges and sewers and barricades of Paris on the brink of revolution.
It has to have this largeness to frame the large ideas and emotions that provide the show’s humanity. Unlike other big things, like say, every Marvel movie, “Les Mis” is about something, many things actually: passion, promises, loss, justice, the painful birth of democracy, the exploitation of the working class, how acts of kindness and mercy redeem a cruel world, and how “to love another person is to see the face of God.” The Fall Experience was a wide-ranging program that included two standouts.
Lia Cirio’s “After” demanded an immense amount from the dancers. Set to selections from Lera Auerbach’s almost unhinged (in the best possible way) “24 Preludes for Violin and Piano,” “After” runs dancers through movements grounded in classical ballet but pushed into experimental modern dance. Crystal Pite’s “The Season’s Canon” was the most thrilling piece I’ve seen the company do.
Max Richter’s drone-to-crescendo reimagining of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” provided the canvas for Pite to turn a huge cast into a series of shifting organic forms, cresting waves of arms, pulses of bobbing heads, twists and turns, kinetic energy coming from scores of dancers. —.
