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	AMADEUS Presented by New Repertory Theatre at The Arsenal Center For The Arts April 28-May 26, 2013 Just Extended through May 26! A play with music by Peter Shaffer directed by Jim Petosa Winner of 7 Tony Awards including Best Play, Amadeus explodes with musical masterpieces and richness of language, harkening back to times of excess and indulgence. Called “triumphant” by The New York... AMADEUS Presented by New Repertory Theatre at The Arsenal Center For The Arts April 28-May 26, 2013 Event Rating (0 votes)
	Jimmy Titanic Presented by New Repertory Theatre at Arsenal Center Black Box June 19-June 30, 2013 New Repertory Theatre Presents a Tir Na Production of JIMMY TITANIC A Boston Premiere To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's only voyage, this comedic drama takes place in heaven, exploring the lost dreams of immigrants looking for a new life, fleeing oppression, poverty, or the law-or just looking for a fresh... Jimmy Titanic Presented by New Repertory Theatre at Arsenal Center Black Box June 19-June 30, 2013 Event Rating (0 votes)

Media Reviews

• Event Name: INDULGENCES
  Article: 'Indulgences' sells clever brand of fun
  Boston Hearld - Jan 22, 2010
  By Jenna Scherer

  The title of Chris Craddock’s “Indulgences” lets you know what to expect. Craddock is off on a spree - mashing genres and making up rules as...
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  The title of Chris Craddock’s “Indulgences” lets you know what to expect. Craddock is off on a spree - mashing genres and making up rules as his whims take him. You might as well indulge the man - even if you’re not always gulping down the snake oil he’s selling.
  
  Kate Warner last staged this play two years ago, during her previous gig as artistic director of Dad’s Garage Theatre in Atlanta. Now that she’s helming the New Repertory Theatre, Warner takes on “Indulgences” again. It’s a playful, if sometimes pointless, production.
  
  Ground zero for Craddock’s cut-and-paste story is a dive bar on some sort of astral plane. The tables and chairs are see-through and insubstantial, but the whiskey is very real. So, apparently, is the bar’s most reliable regular, a drunken heavenly emissary in an ill-fitting suit (Benjamin Evett). He’s in the business of selling indulgences - which, if you recall your medieval history, are basically get-out-of-purgatory-free cards sold by the Catholic Church to wary sinners. They were a big con, but these salesman’s are supposedly the genuine article.
  
  In walk two gents (Ed Hoopman and Tony Larkin) in Elizabethan garb - minor “Macbeth” characters Malcolm and Fleance, if you’re keeping score - groaning in faux-Shakespearean verse about their impossible love. The salesman agrees to help them murder Malcolm’s dad, the King (Joel Colodner), so the pair can usher in an age of same-sex-marriage tolerance in their realm. Meanwhile, the King has switched places with a modern-day businessman (Neil A. Casey) he met at the astral watering hole.
  
  If that sounds random, it is. Craddock writes like a kid who’s mixed together all his Lego sets and is curious to figure out what the fireman and the dinosaur might say to each other at the space station. A Stoppard-esque dialogue about identity gives way to a medieval sitcom, gives way to a bitter monologue on living in delicious sin, David Mamet-style. The voice of God sounds like Frank the rabbit from “Donnie Darko” and there’s a joke or two we already heard in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.”
  
  As the salesman, Evett has way too much fun. He’s our stumbling, blustering guide to Craddock’s crazy world - and the most vividly realized character onstage. The others are basically pawns, but that doesn’t stop Colodner from roping us into the King’s existential crisis, or Leigh Barrett from cracking us up as a throwaway villain.
  
  More fun is had in “Indulgence” ’s second half, but it’s hard to care much about characters who are little more than playthings in Craddock’s hands.
  
  “INDULGENCES”
  
  Presented by New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, Monday night. Through Feb. 6.
  
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• Event Name: INDULGENCES
  Article: Mash Up Your Shakespeare
  The Hub Review - Jan 19, 2010
  By Thomas Garvey

  One more into the time-space-continuum gap! Tony Larkin, Benjamin Evett, and Ed Hoopman indulge themselves.
  
  So - are you ready for a...
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  One more into the time-space-continuum gap! Tony Larkin, Benjamin Evett, and Ed Hoopman indulge themselves.
  
  So - are you ready for a gay-Tom-Stoppard, "Fleance-and-Malcolm-Aren't-Dead-But-Getting-Married-in-Vegas" kind of metaphysical-philosophical mash-up? At first I didn't think I was, either, but I admit the New Rep, and its crack comic cast (headlined by a hilarious Benjamin Evett), did eventually win me over, and I began to indulge Indulgences, the new production of Chris Craddock's meta-comedy which runs through February 6. This is a very silly show, and kind of conceptually sloppy - but it is a funny show, certainly the funniest in town, and you don't have to tell me what that means in January in Boston. (It means the New Rep has a hit.)
  
  And it's nice to see new artistic director Kate Warner, who seemed to stumble slightly on her maiden voyage with Mister Roberts, right herself here, with a crisp, clever production that's tighter than a duck's you-know-what. It's true the play itself isn't nearly that taut - Canadian author Chris Craddock mashes together Shakespeare, Mamet, The Prince and the Pauper, "Fractured Fairy Tales," and a whole lot more in this long-form skit about cross-dressing and destiny - and part of the joke is that he doesn't much care that most of his gambits don't hang together. Shakespeare's Fleance and Malcolm, for instance, who drive the plot of the show, were never even friends in Macbeth, so when they meet for drinks in some sort of Purgatorial pick-up bar with a fallen angel who's a kind of insurance salesman, we do think to ourselves, "WTF, milord?" Or at least I did.
  
  But wait a minute, let's back up. Here's the set-up: two Shakespearean characters (Malcolm and Fleance, played by Ed Hoopman and Tony Larkin) walk into a bar, where they meet, no, not a priest and a rabbi, but a seller of "indulgences" (Benjamin Evett). Remember those? I think the Catholic church actually still sells 'em, but at their height they were the proud pinnacle of Her venerable commitment to corruption - time-off in Purgatory was available for a variety of sins, for a small fee (or a large one, depending on the sin).
  
  Only Craddock's salesman isn't some hack from the Vatican - he's from the Big Kahuna himself. As in Jehovah. Yahweh. The Almighty.
  
  Which is quite an interesting intellectual proposition - God himself is offering an escape hatch from his own morality? Indulgences that work? And get a load of His reason - he wants to "re-inforce free will!" Holy conundrum, Mr. Stoppard! For a moment, it seems like a heavenly host of fascinating dialectics about the knotty problem of pre-destination might be in the offing.
  
  But no such luck; playwright Craddock may scramble the dramaturgical map to pin his themes, but he isn't actually serious enough about them to indulge in any intellectual depth. Instead, he skates along the contradictions of Catholic philosophy to hilarious, but not deeply satisfying, effect. Still, that's enough for Saturday night. I won't get into the silly-and-sillier plot, except to say that Malcolm and Fleance want to both get hitched and kill Dad, who's not hip to modern romance. Only they don't know that Dad isn't actually Dad - he sort of swapped spots in the universe with some schlub from the present day (back in that Purgatorial bar). Who wants his old gig back. Then there's the schemers in the palace, who methinks fpout a moft excellent pastiche of pfeudo-Shakespeareana; they've got their sub-plot, too.
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• Event Name: INDULGENCES
  "it's the right title"
  Comment posted by: theatrical devotee from brookline, MA, Jan 19, 2010
  

  "To treat with leniency". The subject matter cries out for the wit and brilliance and pace of a Tom Stoppard comedy, and unfortunately, Chris Craddock is not there yet. It's treating a serious... Expand

  "To treat with leniency". The subject matter cries out for the wit and brilliance and pace of a Tom Stoppard comedy, and unfortunately, Chris Craddock is not there yet. It's treating a serious subject, but it doesn't leave you with anything to actually think about. The steady stream of one liners is not fresh or rapier sharp. The play is mildly amusing, but the production is also hampered by a cast and direction that offers 'frenetic' instead of a crisp volley of repartee, punctuated by the perfectly times pregnant pauses. This sort of play requires the ensemble timing and elegance of Restoration comedy married to the wackiness of commedia del arte. They've got some of the wachiness, but that's all. Collapse