A theater season marked by transitions
As theater seasons go, the one that's winding down now feels almost like an intermission. The fall will bring us new artistic directors at our two biggest companies, as well as a pre-Broadway tryout of a musical - a former staple of the downtown scene, but something that has seemed to be going the way of the rotary phone. At the moment, though, the curtain has yet to rise on those new acts.
So what will we remember from 2007-08? At the Huntington Theatre Company, artistic director Nicholas Martin's final season had a few standouts and a few disappointments; at the American Repertory Theatre, this interregnum year (programmed by acting artistic director Gideon Lester after Robert Woodruff's departure last spring) leaves a similarly mixed impression.
For someone who admires both these companies for different reasons - the Huntington for its production values, the ART for its risk-taking spirit - it's a surprise, and not a particularly happy one, to realize that the season's most vivid memories often came from other stages. The good news is that the new artistic directors we'll be getting - Peter DuBois at the Huntington, Diane Paulus at the ART - both seem to have strong records of staging imaginative and expert productions. And it's a happy fact that both have ties to New York's Public Theater, a promising omen for creative and engaging work if ever there was one.
Another surprise emerges from considering the downtown theater scene this year. The big houses were too often dark, yet some of the best shows, from "Sweeney Todd" to "My Fair Lady" and "Avenue Q," were musicals on tour.
A touring musical of a very different stripe also serves as a marker of the strength of our smaller local companies. John Kelly's "Paved Paradise: The Songs of Joni Mitchell" was a highlight of the Theater Offensive's Out on the Edge festival; it was also, in its spooky and satisfying evocation of a pop-culture icon, one of the finest pieces of theater on a Boston stage last fall.
In fact, many of the most memorable shows this season appeared not on large and lavishly decorated stages, but in small black boxes. At the BCA's Calderwood Pavilion, "Angels in America" featured a remarkably strong ensemble and a coherent, cleanly designed production; let's just hope it wasn't a fatally ambitious overreach for Boston Theatre Works, which is now on hiatus as it looks to regain its financial footing.
In the BCA's smaller Plaza Black Box Theatre, not one but two small companies pulled off an even more ambitious feat: a six-hour staging of the nine plays in "The Kentucky Cycle," a sprawling, occasionally overwrought, but generally compelling journey through two centuries of US history as seen by a few Appalachian families. The small Zeitgeist Stage Company and its even tinier co-producer, Way Theatre Artists, demonstrated that collaboration, hard work, and creative problem-solving are sometimes more valuable than big budgets or well-known casts.
On its own, too, Way Theatre Artists produced a couple of fine plays: the Boston premiere of Don DeLillo's "Love-Lies-Bleeding," at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, and Shelagh Stephenson's "The Memory of Water," which closed yesterday in the smallest BCA venue, Hall A. For a minuscule company in its first full season, that's quite a track record.
Ryan Landry's Gold Dust Orphans have been around a lot longer than that, but their usual venue - the basement of a gay nightclub in the Fenway - keeps them below many theatergoers' radar. That's too bad, because the troupe shows more invention and wit on a shoestring budget than many larger companies do: Just look at this year's "Medea," which was bloody hilarious, or the sharp "Wizard of Oz" sendup, "Whizzin'."
What the Orphans have in common with Way and Boston Theatre Works, aside from small pockets, is a spirit of collaboration. The work they put onstage has a coherence and coordination that happens only when people work together, focusing on the success of the whole piece rather than their own parts.
Collaboration was also a hallmark of some strong work at local midsize theaters, from "The History Boys" and "The Little Dog Laughed" at SpeakEasy Stage Company to "The Scene" at the Lyric Stage Company and "The Clean House" at New Repertory Theatre. A fine sense of ensemble, too, animated the Actors' Shakespeare Project's production of "The Tempest," with an excellent troupe surrounding the fragile, fierce energy of Alvin Epstein's Prospero.
That same spirit of shared purpose is always abundantly in evidence at Trinity Repertory Company, which is why I keep urging Bostonians to hop on I-95 and get down to Providence. Trinity's ensemble was particularly strong in "All the King's Men," but it also clicked beautifully in a stylish "Blithe Spirit," a smart new play about censorship called "Some Things Are Private," and artistic director Curt Columbus's sweetly old-fashioned new boy-meets-boy musical, "Paris By Night."
Those were just a few of the premieres worth seeing this year. At the Huntington, Ronan Noone contributed two: "The Atheist," a biting pop-culture satire that was probably even better once Campbell Scott learned all his lines, and "Brendan," a bittersweet study of an immigrant slowly putting down new roots. And Huntington playwriting fellowship alum Melinda Lopez had another premiere, this time at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, with her crisply rocking tale of family dysfunction, "Gary."
There were other new scripts around town, of course: the overwritten, overlong hostage drama "The Cry of the Reed" at the Huntington and the bad-Will-hunting "Cardenio" at the ART. But I'd rather not dredge up my memories of those, if it's all the same to you.
Instead, let's reflect on some of the more successful moments at the ART and the Huntington. We had the merrily mashed-up operas by the visiting Theatre de la Jeune Lune, "Don Juan Giovanni" and "Figaro," which opened the ART's season, and Scott Zigler's spare, taut "Copenhagen," which proved a highlight of it. Another visitor, Nilaja Sun, also made a strong impression with "No Child. . ." The Huntington, meanwhile, saved its best for last: Martin's exuberant, exquisite staging of "She Loves Me," a musical I wish I'd met sooner. It's a lovely grace note to a season of transitions, and one that sends us off into summer with the hope of fresh surprises when the curtain rises in the fall.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
