There is a song in The Last Five Years titled, “I Can Do Better Than That” and if The Montgomery Playhouse & Theatre @ CBT want to fill the seats, Producers David Jones and Elizabeth Weiss really need to do better. To ad lib a line from Mel Brooks, “What they did to Jason Robert Brown, Booth did to Lincoln.” When you put up a show with only two actors and music by JRB you need to make sure that your actors and Musical Director are up to the task.
Measure for Measure, now presented by Britches and Hose Theater Company, has always been a dark play, and it seems darker still in these dark times. A leader decides to make his country great again, appointing one who is of tremendous hypocrisy and cruelty.
John Moss is that leader, Duke Vincentio, his performance growing stronger through the evening. His appointee is Glen Hochkeppel as Angelo, brilliantly disturbing as he enters with a feckless hand gesture and a sweep of his cape.
Mary Burnett is clad in the scarlet of fire and blood as Medea. Britches and Hose Theater Company’s new production of the Greek tragedy by Euripides both boils with anger and freezes with cold calculation. It opens with Arielle Seidman as the Nurse, skillfully relating how Medea has been wronged: her husband Jason has picked a younger wife, the daughter of the king, so Medea and her two children are to be banished.
Hate is not a Laramie value. And either the word is sufficient or it is not. It is a strong word, a word of intolerance, a word that cannot be ignored when addressing the heinous crimes that put Laramie, Wyoming on the map. On November 14, 1998 members of the Tectonic Theater Project traveled to the small town and conducted interviews with the people of Laramie, the result of which became a tragically beautiful play known as The Laramie Project.