31-03-2025
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.
