items tagged with Kimberly Furness

A half-hour before Friday's performance of On Golden Pond at the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, the theatre's producer (and Pond director) Dennis Hitchcock took the stage, and after making the traditional opening-night welcomes, warned that the show's first act alone ran nearly 80 minutes - a long haul, he explained, for elder audiences. Yet I'm thinking that Hitchcock's announcement was made less out of concern for the crowd's bladders than out of justifiable pride - a trek to the restroom would force people to miss parts of the show, and with the stunningly fine performance Michael Kennedy is giving here, who would want to miss even one?

According to the elusive Theory of Everything, espoused in Jacquelyn Reingold’s String Fever, life is composed of a series of hidden dimensions that fold up within one another and overlap, creating unseen, generally unacknowledged connections, and giving meaning to even our most random encounters.
Read More About Physics Class: "String Fever" At The Nighswander Theatre, Through May 28...

Chris Jansen, the artistic director of the New Ground Theatre, is a self-described “Junior Theatre kid,” and has the pictures to prove it. She thinks.
Read More About New Ground Gives Junior Theatre A Facelift...

Chief among many surprises in Circa ‘21 Dinner Playhouse’s current production of The King & I is the re-discovery of just how funny the show is. For many, myself included, the news of another Rodgers & Hammerstein revival is enough to fill you with trepidation; must we sit through one of their timeless extravaganzas yet again? But it’s easy to forget that this theatrical duo is legendary for good reason. Beyond their undeniable musical talents, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote strong, well-constructed shows and empathetic characters, and their productions always feature an intriguing, nearly treacherous dark side; Rodgers & Hammerstein felt no compunction about casually killing off major characters. (Every time I see The Sound of Music I have to remind myself: Oh, right. There are Nazis in this.) And although I’d be content to never see South Pacific again, a recent, invigorating production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s State Fair at Assumption High School was a welcome reminder of the duo’s gifts, and Circa ’21’s The King & I is fantastically fine, engaging and memorable and, to a quite unexpected degree, hilarious.