Alan Paul: Last News

Our Town to life on stage. Especially during an ongoing global pandemic.“It’s been one of the craziest things, putting on this show in the time of COVID,” says Alan Paul, associate artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, who directed the organization’s current production of the Thornton Wilder classic.Initially scheduled to run the first two months of 2022, the show was postponed until May in an effort to steer clear of this winter’s first wave of COVID’s omicron variant. “And then when we were getting ready to open the show, a bunch of people in the cast got COVID.

Our Town (★★★★☆) at the Shakespeare Theatre expressively conjures an entire population and bygone way of American life.They were bygone days in 1938 when Thorton Wilder wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set just after the turn of the century in bucolic Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Wilder directed in the text that the action should unfold on a bare stage, where the span of a life might be measured over the twelve years spent with the citizenry of this small town.Bustling underneath the sturdy, arching beams of set designer Wilson Chin’s wood-frame theater-within-a-theater, Paul’s excellent cast do evoke not just the tapestry of family ties and neighborly disputes in Grover’s Corners, but also a vibrant sense of the landscape.In their eyes, we can see the sunflowers and butternut trees, smell the sweet scent of heliotrope on a moonlit night.

Chris Willman Music WriterLooking back at the last 50 years, you’d be hard-pressed to say the world has gotten a lot more harmonious since then — not figuratively, in the geopolitical sphere, and certainly not literally, in a popular music world that’s become a slave to the rhythm, and to singers’ disinterest in sharing a mic, much less a spotlight. But you can’t fault the Manhattan Transfer for not doing their part — and just about everyone else’s, too — to keep the spirit of harmony alive ever since the group formed in 1972.At their modern-day shows, attendees may not know whether to weep or to literally get a buzz on from the actual physiological oscillation produced by four master voices meticulously coming together.