Latest news with #NightSideSongs
CBS News
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
This greater Boston area musical encourages the audience to sing along
A unique piece of theater, where everyone is encouraged to participate and sing along, is helping to build a community. In American Repertory Theater's production of "Night Side Songs," the actors aren't on a traditional stage, but in the center of a circle, surrounded by the audience. Director Taibi Magar says, "It's the story of one woman's journey through illness, but it's also about so much more." "It's a communal music-theater experience," one that Magar says "really requires a huge amount of intimacy with the performance." She and the show's writers, Daniel and Patrick Lazour, started working on the piece before the pandemic. But Magar says the experience of COVID helped refine it. "It's about what it is to go through that illness journey, but it's also a celebration of caretakers, and both the professional ones, doctors, nurses, but also the family and friends," Magar said. "The Lazours and I did a series of interviews with local doctors and nurses involved in the Harvard community, and it was a transformative process. I don't think without those interviews we would have ended up where we were." Multiple Tony-nominee Mary Testa is in the cast. The cancer-survivor feels the material is easy to connect to. "No one is free and clear from grief or stress or trauma or any of that stuff. And if you are, then you are incredibly lucky, but no one gets out of this without experiencing some form of that or having to care for someone," Testa said. Magar says, while the subject matter is serious, the Lazours' script holds a lot of joy. "They've found silliness, they've found all the little weird things about life that are just ironic and funny." Testa says it all comes down to connection. "It's a beautiful thing, and it is really like a gathering," Testa said. Magar agrees, saying, "We are in a loneliness epidemic, you know, the nature of the world right now, and I think this piece brings people closer to each other…. It's been so moving at the end, when you just watch people just grab one another, just gently want to hold on tight to each other, audiences that don't know each other, exchanging a few words or a glance, everyone feels much closer to each other by the end. I think we really need that more than ever." You can see "Night Side Songs" at two locations. The piece will be at the Cambridge Masonic Temple through Sunday, April 6. Then between April 8 and 20, it heads to Hibernian Hall in Roxbury.
Boston Globe
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In 'Night Side Songs,' a moving exploration of illness
The Lazour brothers premiered ' In the basement auditorium of the Cambridge Masonic Temple on opening night last weekend, a cast of four singer-actors found inventive ways to narrate the story of Yasmine (Brooke Ishibashi), a young woman diagnosed with cancer. By turns, the actors play doctors, lovers, and close family members, as well as off-shoot characters ranging from a hippie songwriter to a bawdy 12th century innkeeper. Advertisement Robi Hager in A.R.T.'s "Night Side Songs." Nile Scott Studios Led by cast member Robi Hager, the cast addresses the audience directly with vocal instructions on how to join the sing-along portions on several of the Lazours' original songs. Don't fret – the actors, fittingly, share a great bedside manner. And no one is forced to sing if they'd prefer not to. Advertisement Whether the show's multiple storylines can hang together is another matter. The innkeeper (played by It's Yasmine's story that provides the bulk of the narrative, and its most moving moments. While in treatment, she meets a clumsy suitor named Frank (Jonathan Raviv). Their courtship is sweet. They get married, as the officiant says, 'he in health, she in sickness.' But Yasmine enjoys several years in remission. Then a new form of cancer attacks. It's a known side effect of the chemotherapy cocktail she's been relying on. (Another vignette depicts the vehement debates among the real-life team of researchers in the 1960s who developed the treatment.) As Yasmine's health declines, the cast members roll a hospital bed to center stage. The physical indignities of illness and the psychological toll it takes on those closest to the afflicted are summed up in three simple words: 'It gets messy.' The healthcare industry in America comes under plenty of scrutiny. One segment largely consists of a litany of Yasmine's mounting out-of-pocket costs to cover her medical care. The audience participation component builds from a simple utterance ('Ah!') on an early number called 'The Reason' (as in, we often feel the need to assign some sort of 'reason' to the sicknesses of people we know) to a lovely recitation of a couple's small moments of connection and forgiveness ('When you put your hand inside my hand/What you said or did is of no consequence'). Advertisement 'Please turn to your hymnals,' Hager says. On the musical numbers, the cast is accompanied by Alex Bechtel on piano. Dobson sometimes strolls around the floor strumming an acoustic guitar, like a troubadour. The show takes place effectively in the round, with the audience seated in tiers on three sides. With the lights up in the auditorium and the cast dressed in everyday clothes, the show feels like the kind of community theater the Lazours clearly intended to honor. Director Taibi Magar ('We Live in Cairo') makes it a priority to break down barriers between the actors and the audience. What may seem like a distressing subject for a sing-along in fact becomes the whole point of the show. 'We get through it together,' the narrators explain. 'There are thousands of people the show cannot contain.' As Sontag noted, none of us are immune to life-threatening illnesses, one way or another. NIGHT SIDE SONGS Directed by Taibi Magar. Words and music by the Lazours. $35 and up, with $5 promo code available. Through April 6 at Cambridge Masonic Temple, 1950 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge. April 8-20 at Hibernian Hall, 184 Dudley St., Roxbury. James Sullivan can be reached at .
