Welcome — or welcome back — to Tufts! Those of us who spent this summer in the Boston area had a lot to be excited about. Between World Cup crowds, Sail Boston’s fleet of visiting tall ships and special festivities for the nation’s 250th anniversary, this summer was one to remember.
While the summer tends to be an in-between time for the city’s subscription-based theater seasons, Boston has enjoyed a considerable variety of professional productions since Tufts students wrapped up in May. Consider this an inexhaustive recap — I made use of my student discounts and saw as much as I could — and a preview of what I’m looking forward to this year from some of the area’s theater institutions.
As universities across the city held their commencement ceremonies, SpeakEasy Stage wrapped up its season with a production of “Swept Away” — the musical’s first since a short run on Broadway in 2024. At the curtain call following the evening performance on May 9, the audience gave a standing ovation as cast member Nicholas Papayoanou was presented with his diploma from Emerson College after missing his official graduation to perform in the show.
The one-act jukebox musical, featuring music by The Avett Brothers and inspired by their 2004 concept album “Mignonette,” tells a bleak story of four shipwrecked New Bedford whalers. The show’s book by John Logan was criticized on Broadway for its unsatisfying plot and thin character development. SpeakEasy couldn’t fix that in Boston but still achieved a fulfilling spectacle through the performances of the ensemble and four principal actors, the novelty of the folk-rock score, the aerial arts by Ezra Quinlan and set and lighting designs that took advantage of the Wimberly Theatre’s larger proscenium space (adjacent to the company’s typical black box at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Calderwood Pavilion).
SpeakEasy Stage kicks off its new season later this month, which has shifted to feature three shows instead of their typical five, with expanded connective programming aligned with the mainstage productions.
In May, the American Repertory Theater opened the world premiere of “Black Swan” to finish its 2025-26 season. Especially notable for its world premieres of musicals like “Waitress” and “Jagged Little Pill,” the A.R.T. seemed to be aiming for similar Broadway heights with this musical adaptation of the 2010 psychological thriller by the same name starring Natalie Portman.
Such an ambitious premiere being staged down the road in Cambridge compelled me to see the first preview on May 26, for bragging rights, and to see it again in July before it closed, for good measure. The bold musical was directed and choreographed by Sonya Tayeh, choreographer of Broadway’s “Moulin Rouge!” and the A.R.T.’s fantastic “Gatsby: An American Myth” in 2024 (not to be confused with Broadway’s “The Great Gatsby”). Melanie Moore gave an impressive performance in the demanding role of Nina, the protagonist who descends into madness in pursuit of perfection while performing the lead role in an avant-garde version of Swan Lake.
The music by Dave Malloy follows the path of his best-known “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” this time with elements of Tchaikovsky’s ballet sampled and interpolated within the electronic score. A second watch highlighted some of Malloy’s laughably bizarre but perhaps appropriately unsettling lyrics in numbers by Barbara, Nina’s intense dance mom and Beth, the company’s retired principal ballerina who shows Nina a haunting vision of her future. The special effects — mirrors, blood, strobe lights and a disappearing act — brought Nina’s hallucinations to life and forged a musical different from anything I had seen before.
The A.R.T. got an early start to its new season, with a new adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play “Rhinoceros” opening last month, directed by A.R.T. Artistic Director Diane Paulus and starring Emmy Award winners Tatiana Maslany, Paul Giamatti and John Turturro. The play evokes the rise of fascism through the metaphor of a French town where townspeople begin turning into rhinoceroses.
While I enjoyed the performances — Giamatti left it all out there — and appreciated the play’s utter bizarreness and pseudo-playfulness for what they are, I struggled to understand the sense of profound meaning other critics have found in this adaptation. Take this with a grain of salt from someone unfamiliar with the genre, but, while certainly more applicable than ever, the social commentary feels primitive and leaves the door open for problematic interpretations of what the ‘rhinoceros takeover’ is. Though I will admit that a few lines from the script would make great quotes in an email signature.
“Rhinoceros,” running through Sept. 27, is Paulus’ last production at the Loeb Drama Center in Harvard Square before the A.R.T. moves across the river to its new home at the Goel Center for Creativity & Performance in Allston. Next May, Paulus will direct “Life on Mars,” an immersive production using the music of David Bowie, as the venue’s inaugural performance. In the meantime, the A.R.T. will stage two more musicals in Harvard Square this fall and winter.
The Huntington Theatre’s production of Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day” in June, on the other hand, offered hilarious and effective social satire. The play, fresh off a 2025 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play (only having premiered in 2018 and being set in the 2018–19 school year), follows the school board of an ‘inclusive’ and ‘progressive’ private day school in Berkeley, Calif. When a mumps outbreak hits the school, the parents must deal with the issue of vaccines. I will say, it was a lot more exciting than it sounds.
Characters dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes, and repeated plot twists complicate the issues that the characters are wrestling with on stage. One standout sequence involving parents’ messages in a Zoom meeting about the outbreak made the audience erupt in ceaseless collective laughter, even among a sparser Tuesday night crowd in the theater on Huntington Ave.
The Huntington’s varied new season across their two stages at the Calderwood Pavilion and the Huntington Theatre begins on Thursday with the Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize-winning “Purpose.” Other offerings include the last play of Nigerian-American playwright Mfoniso Udofia’s nine-play Ufot Family Cycle, and a new musical called “Unorthodox” based on the memoir by Deborah Feldman, with music by Broadway icons Benj Pasek and Shaina Taub.
Three Broadway national tours made stops at the Citizens Opera House this summer to wrap up the 2025-26 Broadway in Boston season. “Les Misérables” ended its lengthy North American tour in June with a final stop in Boston, which has opened up the possibility to license the title for regional theaters. In fact, Lyric Stage will bring Les Misérables to Boston again starting next April, reimagined for the intimate setting of their 244-seat theater, along with four other plays this season.
“The Great Gatsby” continues to play on Broadway and roar across the country on its national tour, which visited Boston in July. This adaptation differs from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and lacks depth but remains an amusing musical spectacle, even when scaled back on a tour. “Moulin Rouge!” went out with a bang this year, having closed on Broadway on Aug. 30. The national tour of “Moulin Rouge!” also came to a close this summer, finishing its last stop in Boston in early August. The high-energy jukebox musical based on Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film brought the Citizens Opera House to life, although audience members couldn’t help but giggle as characters in serious situations decided to break into pop songs like “Firework” by Katy Perry.
A considerable number of new national tours and returning favorites will visit the Citizens Opera House and the Emerson Colonial Theatre as part of the next season of Broadway in Boston. First up are “Wicked” and “Operation Mincemeat” this fall.
Aside from hosting some of the city’s touring shows, the Emerson Colonial Theatre hosts other special engagements. After stopping in several U.S. cities, “Paranormal Activity,” a horror play featuring an original story based on the film series of the same name, visited the Emerson Colonial Theatre for a limited run in July before opening in Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre last month.
In the play, an American couple moves to London to escape their pasts but learn, as the show’s tagline says: Places aren’t haunted, people are. Despite this slogan, the cross-section of a house set up at the Colonial in July certainly felt haunted. Illusions by Chris Fisher (who also worked on “Black Swan”) and a piercing sound design created real jump scares in the theater, and the book played with humor and more tender moments to intensify the fright. For grabbing my attention harder than anything else I had ever seen, this play was among the most exciting shows of the summer.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you take advantage of Boston’s theater offerings this year!
