Bob Abelman

2 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Bob Abelman

WARWICK, R.I. – “Hamlet” is a play of excesses. It is Shakespeare’s longest work, clocking in at five acts and 30,557 words in its unabridged form. Those words focus largely on the inner thoughts of the play’s endlessly philosophizing and fatally indecisive protagonist, who has been commanded by his father’s ghost to avenge his father’s murder.

3 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Bob Abelman

PROVIDENCE — The great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold used to maintain that if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only “Hamlet” miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would still be successful. At the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, it certainly seems as if the play — which has featured the likes of Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, and Sophie McIntosh as Shakespeare’s most complex protagonist — has rarely been off the stage.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Bob Abelman

PAWTUCKET, R.I. — “On the spectrum.”That’s the phrase that describes Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old who lives with his father in Southwest England in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Simon Stephens’ play is the Olivier- and Tony Award-winning stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 best-selling novel of the same name. The spectrum represents the range of symptoms and skills Christopher possesses that are associated with autism. He has difficulty interacting with others.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Bob Abelman

Legend has it that when screenwriter George Seaton visited old-time character actor Edmund Gwenn as he lay on his death bed, he said, “This must be terribly difficult for you.” Gwenn reportedly replied, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” Harder still is Pierre de Marivaux’s “Triumph of Love,” a commedia dell’arte-informed play first staged at the Théâtre Italien in Paris in 1732 when that style of writing and performance – with its outrageous wordplay, exaggerated characters with hidden...

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Bob Abelman

Most local theaters offered lightweight escapist fare at the time – the musicals “A Gentleman’s Guide To Love & Murder,” “Mamma Mia!” and “Elf,” the offbeat “Straight White Men,” and the comedic “The Flu Season,” among others. But Teatro ECAS, the leading Latino theater in New England, debuted an inspirational tale about the Mirabal sisters, who were assassinated in November of 1960 for standing up to a dictator.