In his review for the Boston Globe, Don Aucoin writes, “Frances Nelson McSherry has attired the entire cast in sumptuous costumes, making this a consistently eye-catching production.”

The full review of “Amadeus” can be found at the Boston Globe.

“Amadeus” is currently playing at Watertown’s New Repertory Theatre and runs until May 19, 2013.

Edge Boston

“[Amelia] Broome’s performance, along with direction from Antonio Ocampo-Guzman (who makes this occasion a master class in itself, as he did two seasons ago with “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune” and last year with “Art”), brings that portrait [of Maria Callas] richly to life.”

Read the full review →

South Shore Critic

“If you’ve lived your whole life for opera, or if you’ve lived your whole life without it, you owe it to yourself to see Terrence McNally’s play “Master Class”, itself a masterpiece of wit, wisdom and warmth. The winner of the 1996 Tony Award as Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Best New Play, it was a tribute to the memory of his beloved La Divina, Maria Callas, as well as a vehicle for a star turn by a series of notable theatrical divas in various productions over the years. It was also, in the guise of a master class on operatic singing and technique, a window into the process of the making of art. In New Rep’s current production, in the masterful hands of Director Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, it is all of this and more. It’s heartbreaking and hilarious, an uncanny portrayal of a larger-then-life legend.”

Read the full review →

Boston Globe

“Stalking the stage in a black sweater and pants and the Hermès scarf McNally prescribes, she radiates authority. When she points her chin and lectures the audience, she can seem arch and artificial. But when she gets down on her knees to show Sophie how to sing Amina’s sleepwalking aria, she loses herself in the music. And when she tells slouching tenor Tony, “Look at me, I’m drinking water, and I have presence,” she does.”

Read the full review →

To learn more about “Master Class,” get details about the cast and crew, or to purchase tickets for the show (which runs through April 21, 2013 at the New Repertory Theatre, Arsenal Center for the Arts, 312 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA 02472), visit the show’s page on the New Repertory Theatre website.

In addi­tion to the all-​​student cast, the pro­duc­tion fea­tures a daz­zling visual and aural display—a chal­lenging task for a small the­atre but a per­fect fit for director Matthew Gray, whose work blends tech­nology with tra­di­tional approaches to acting and stagecraft.

“It’s a pro­duc­tion that works on lots of levels,” said Gray, an assis­tant pro­fessor of the­atre in the Col­lege of Arts, Media and Design.

Donnie Darko tells the story of its trou­bled tit­ular char­acter who is tasked with pre­venting the end of the world, which is due to occur in 28 days. He is assisted by a large rabbit, who iden­ti­fies him­self as Frank, and others in his com­mu­nity, including a reclu­sive former sci­ence teacher, Roberta Sparrow, who pub­lished a book on time travel.

The play, which opened Tuesday night in the Curry Stu­dent Center’s Studio The­atre, relies on unique pro­jec­tions, lighting, video ele­ments, and sound design to tell the story, which includes por­tals and worm­holes across time and space. Cast and crew worked together on the tech­nical ele­ments of the play, breaking into teams tasked with tack­ling dif­ferent com­po­nents of the performance.

Before moving into the Studio The­atre, which was hosting a pro­duc­tion of The Seagull while work on Donnie Darkobegan, they used a Ryder Hall class­room as work­shop and lab­o­ra­tory. There they pre­pared effects that use four pro­jec­tors, six live cam­eras, and com­puter work­sta­tions for live editing, audio play­back, and dig­ital processing.

“We have to flood a school, we have to set fire to a house, we have to create a worm­hole that a plane can fly through,” Gray said. “These are big chal­lenges for a small theatre.”

It is appro­priate that North­eastern is hosting a pro­duc­tion of the play, which was staged at the Cam­bridge, Mass.-based Amer­ican Reper­tory The­ater in 2007. The opening lines ref­er­ence Michael Dukakis, who in the play’s 1988 set­ting is run­ning for pres­i­dent and who is now a Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Polit­ical Sci­ence at North­eastern. But that’s not the reason why the play was selected, Gray said. It was picked because it posed unique the­atrical chal­lenges and fea­tured the kind of large cast best suited for a uni­ver­sity production.

“It’s enig­matic without being pre­ten­tious,” said Gray, who noted that the play forces the audi­ence to decide whether its sci­ence fiction-​​like events are real or simply delu­sions of a men­tally ill teenager.

The play runs through March 24 and tickets are avail­able online at neu​.uni​ver​si​tyt​ickets​.com or by calling 617.373.4700.

[...]Kaiulani Lee’s “Can’t Scare Me: The Story of Mother Jones” is an hour and ten minute one-woman show that tells the tale of a woman who spoke out during a time of great injustice for those who could not speak out for themselves and inspired those who could.

“We were excited to collaborate with an Obie award-winning actress on a production highlighting an important figure in our national history,” said Adam Kassim, program coordinator for the Northeastern University Center of the Arts. “Mother Jones blazed new ground and fought for the rights of laborers at a time when unions and women were struggling for recognition. Mother Jones embodies Northeastern’s entrepreneurial spirit.”

Read the rest of the story →

You describe your book as a “call to action” for arts educators to play a stronger role in the development of undergraduate college curriculums. Why is this so important now?

It’s crit­ical that the arts play a strong role in edu­ca­tion, because they pro­vide alter­na­tive ways to under­stand and express per­sonal, social and eth­ical issues. How­ever, they have had sig­nif­i­cant cuts in K-​​12 throughout the years. I’m now seeing stu­dents who come to the uni­ver­sity who never had sig­nif­i­cant the­atre expe­ri­ences before, so why should they even look for a the­atre expe­ri­ence now? They don’t even know it exists.

Regional the­atres are also reporting that their audi­ences are going away. Their audi­ences are made up of people who are an advanced age, shall we say, and the con­cern is when they are gone, who will go to the theatre?

It seems to me that these three areas should be talking to each other because we are all inter­ested in the same thing. We are all dis­cussing issues of the impor­tance of the arts as a pow­erful tool for dealing with social engage­ment, with the com­mu­nity that one is involved in, issues that relate to humanity and the human con­di­tion. This is where the arts began in ancient times and where the­atre flour­ished more than 2,500 years ago in Greece, and we really have not left that. But in edu­ca­tion in this country we’re finding it’s very dif­fi­cult to embrace that idea.

What do arts educators need to do to bring the arts into a more prominent position in higher education?

My book deals with the impor­tance of get­ting the arts back into the cur­ricu­lums of insti­tu­tions in inno­v­a­tive ways. The arts deal with what insti­tu­tions are inter­ested in: cre­ativity, inno­v­a­tive thinking and prac­tice, expe­ri­en­tial learning, under­grad­uate research, entre­pre­neur­ship, col­lab­o­ra­tion and moving beyond silos. And it just so hap­pens that my dis­ci­pline, the­atre, does that: we work that way, we develop things that under­grad­u­ates are inter­ested in — but nobody knows it.

I think the reason why nobody knows it is because we haven’t come to the cur­riculum table. And as I have recently heard it said, “If you’re not at the cur­riculum table, you’re on the menu.” That’s some­thing that con­cerns me quite a bit. We need to talk about what it is that we do and we need to talk about how we develop stu­dents who have what we call an enlight­ened eye, the ability to look at or listen to a work of art and under­stand what that piece is saying about our rela­tion­ship to society, about who we are and our rela­tion­ship to others.

How can theatre change undergraduate education, especially in disciplines that aren’t traditionally tied to liberal arts?

The plays we pro­duce are written by play­wrights who are inter­ested in the human con­di­tion. So what we do, as actors, designers, tech­ni­cians, col­lab­o­ra­tors, is mine that play and under­stand how that play illu­mi­nates not only the world and society of the time it was written, but also our con­tem­po­rary world. And you cannot do that without engaging in inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research.

I’m a director and a dra­maturg, so I do that through cre­ative research. This kind of applied research encour­ages deep thinking with our stu­dents — it’s not just per­forming, it’s asking ques­tions like, “Why does the char­acter do the things he or she does? Why don’t they do some­thing else?” We’re really exploring moral issues, often, and in order to do that you have to be well-​​read in his­tory, in polit­ical sci­ence, in other cul­tures, in phi­los­ophy and the list goes on. It embraces every­thing cen­tral to the uni­ver­sity of today: crit­ical thinking, cre­ative thinking, inter­dis­ci­pli­nary thinking, mean­ingful research and the exchange of ideas across fields.

I would call a play a case study of a par­tic­ular group of people at a par­tic­ular time. And cre­atively trans­fer­ring that case study to the stage is, in a way, expe­ri­en­tial learning. We take all we have learned, we develop it and we apply it to the pro­duc­tion of a play so that a larger group of people can take that infor­ma­tion and think about it, expe­ri­ence it and feel it. Hope­fully that encour­ages social engage­ment and gets your audi­ence talking about social issues.

On Thursday morning, Apple announced a series of related initiatives designed to modernize learning based around its iPad tablet. Apple is hoping to “reinvent textbooks” and change the way we learn with an updated iBooks 2 app, which works with interactive textbooks built with the iBooks Author desktop app, and an expansion of iTunes U that offers course materials and K-12 access. And according to several experts we spoke to, Apple’s announcement today could do just that.

Read more on Ars Technica