Powder & Wig explores campus in “10 Minutes”

None of us really knew how many people would show up on a Saturday night. Seeing a variety of students...made me happy to be part of the production.

Molière’s Tartuffe: a timeless production

A strength of the performance could be easily seen in the cast’s skillful interpretation of the source material.

Vagina Monologues empowers with laughs

All the women with monologues were incredibly supportive and encouraging of one another. Even alone on stage we were never alone. Everyone was there for each other.

A funny thing in Strider Theater

Powder and Wig’s production was a notable addition to this comedy’s history on the stage.

A provocative puppet show

The events of this Christmas follow the three children into their futures as the play flashes forward and reveals that the dynamics of this dysfunctional family have lasting effects.

Colby on Stage: a showcase of student talent

This tradition began in 2009 and is a great way to give parents and fellow students a chance to see the performers’ love for the arts come alive.

A bold production of “Unwrap Your Candy”

The evening was about as post-modern as post-modern can get.

Boston Ballet returns to Hill, wows viewers

A year and a half after their last visit, internationally acclaimed Boston Ballet principal dancers Kathleen Breen Combes and Yury Yanowsky pirouetted their way back to the Hill this past Saturday, Oct. 1.

Porgy and Bess delights at the American Repertory Theatre

The A.R.T.’s production of Porgy and Bess as a while was nothing less than spectacular.

Up in smoke: Powder and Wig’s Reefer Madness

Considering the cast and crew’s time constraints, this year’s show was another impressive display of students’ passion and creativity under pressure.

Cuchulain comes full circle

This semester, Richard Sewell, a retired theater and dance professor, returned to the College as a guest director to put on W.B. Yeats’ “Cuchulain” play cycle. The task was an ambitious one, as the plays cover a wide range of moods and settings and are rarely performed all together, not to mention the challenge of the heavy poetic text.

Students’ new art pieces

“The New Works Festival is a really all encompassing show,” says Ali Reader ’12, a dancer in the collaborative company. “This festival has been a huge undertaking, and it has brought together a variety actors, directors, writers, dancers and tech crew at Colby and given them a chance to work together on one project.” 

Solid acting overcomes tepid script

Certainly, the outlandishness of these residents is initially endearing and each bewildering resolution elicits both contented relief and intrigue from the audience.  There are, however, only so many “happy endings” and theatrical lip locks an audience can pragmatically endure.
Plot foibles aside, the acting and direction were truly impressive, making the dragging storyline endurable. 

Powder and Wig’s Inherit the Wind offers strong performances but muddled theme

Among other things, the [Scopes Monkey Trial] brought to the fore issues of orthodoxy and free thinking (remember, the 1920s saw the first Red Scare in America), science’s uneasy rise and religion’s (seemingly) declining place in American culture. However, given the context of the 1950s when the play was written, it functions as a parable about the Army-McCarthy hearing and the Red baiting that characterized the decade (and beyond). The central issue, then,  is the one of orthodoxy and free thinking, with religion and science serving figurative functions.

Production of The Laramie Project "does it right"

The Laramie Project makes the audience extremely aware that this is a dramatization, but without an alienating effect. In fact, the opposite is true. Despite its intentional discontinuities and its pastiche texture, the play keeps its emotional grip on you throughout.

Last Days of Judas Iscariot

“The play is about the violent rupture of relationships…about the choices we make in our personal relationships that are turning points,” Coulter explained. “You have to make some decision from that point on whether you [decide] to stay in that relationship [which is now] fundamentally altered or whether the relationship gets torn apart [because of the choices you’ve made].”

Bartók Night combines the best of both worlds

[Bartók Night] is a subtle examination of Bartók the man, his music and his place during a     transformative period in history.

Professor's original play draws world class talent

Professor of Theater and Dance Lynne Conner’s collaboration with the Borromeo String Quartet, quartet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music, a truly world class and highly sought after ensemble, is especially exciting.

Witty and bright, even after over 100 years

Mockery of societal norms and of the pursuit of love and marriage are implicit in the play, and Colby actors largely executed this theme through their humorous melodramatic actions and heightened, dynamic enthusiasm.

Suddenly, Powder & Wig showed us they can

The production upheld a balance between skill and playfulness and between presentation and fun. The result was a wonderful play enriched with a humorous, personal touch.

Smells like Teen Spirit: exploring masculine angst

There is a story that when Elia Kazan was directing Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, he had to keep re-doing the actors’ blocking because people could not take their eyes off Brando—how in Brando’s hands Streetcar was not about Blanche, but about Stanley. I was reminded of this story as I watched the Theater and Dance Department’s production of This is Our Youth.

Unconventional theater in unconventional places

The Mousetrap Weaves a Labyrinthine

This past weekend, Powder and Wig unveiled its latest production: Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. As with most works by Christie, the show is a labyrinthine mass of plot twists and red herrings designed to keep the audience guessing the show’s outcome right up until the very end. The basic premise is this: a young, recently married couple named Mollie and Giles Ralston run a guesthouse in rural England. One night, as a massive snowstorm strikes, five very different and peculiar guests arrive just as news gets out that there has been a murder in London and the killer is on the loose. A police detective arrives (on skis, no less) and informs everyone that the murderer left behind a note indicating that he is headed to that very guesthouse to kill again. Cue the ominous music!

Viva La Revolucion: Next! is Epic Theater

Judith Butler wrote, “Fantasy is not the opposite of reality, it is what reality forecloses.” While Butler wrote this in reference to issues of gender (look her up, she will blow your mind), I think this sentiment can be applied to the kind of ideological work musical theater can do, in that it imagines a space that allows us to experience, momentarily, the possibilities not yet available to us in reality.

Who's Next! for a shag?

Bash skillfully probes horrible people doing horrible

Welcome to Miskatonic University

This past weekend, Powder and Wig put on a production of The Deadline, an original rock musical written and directed by Andy Bolduc '10, with music by Nic Robichaud '09. It played to sold-out crowds on Friday and Saturday nights and marked the culmination of nearly nine months of work for the duo.

The Deadline

The Colby Echo interviews Andy Bolduc about his new musical.

Metamorphoses is Impressive in all Aspects

The Theater and Dance Department's production of Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses is definitely not one to miss. Beyond having a swimming pool built into the stage (God knows what difficulties ensued), the production is very well-executed in all aspects.

Metamorphoses will have weekend premiere

The major selling point for the Theater and Dance Department's production of Mary Zimmerman's Tony award nominated play Metamorphoses is the swimming pool on stage. It ranges from six inches at its shallowest point and four feet at its deepest. That's to get people in the seats, because how many times can you say you saw a swimming pool on stage? Beyond the novelty of the pool, the hope is the audience will appreciate the miracle that is art.

Production is "Full of Sound and Fury"

As I sit here listening to the wind whistling by my window on this dark and foggy Thursday, October 22, it seems an appropriate night to have just seen Powder and Wig's opening show of Macbeth by William Shakespeare, directed by Sean Senior '10. Putting on a Shakespeare production is challenging in and of itself, but the difficulties become more daunting when a cast only has a month of limited rehearsal time. However, this cast and crew completed their task with energy and talent.

Powder and Wig strikes like Grease lightning

The members of Powder and Wig are not new to the kind of manic creation Mr. Bernstein described. Last year, they put together The Rocky Horror Picture Show in one week. Could they deliver again with Grease cast, rehearsed and staged in only eight days? Was there ever really a doubt?

Crazy homeless man to be in play

Throwing in the striptease-clever, quite clever

Extravagant masquerades, acrobatics and a mystery

Colby, Bates, Bowdoin: the theatric fusion