February 21, 2026 – About thirty minutes into Hub Theatre's delightful and jarring Ionesco double feature, I caught my breath long enough to think, God, I can feel myself developing new vocal stims in real time. Which is kind of the point. The Bald Soprano was inspired by Eugene Ionesco's English lessons, full of bizarre (or should that be "bizarre!" with a crisp RP accent and a flourish?) sentences repeated over and over. From the start, the dialogue is slightly off-kilter, with contradictory or downright nonsensical sentiments delivered over and over in a pleasantly flat English affect.
This was my first in-person experience with theater of the absurd, and I can very easily see a world in which it would have fallen flat for me. In scripts designed to lack any of the elements that normally keep me leaning slightly forward in a dark room for two hours – things like a coherent narrative or at least emotional arc, witty jokes, and/or characters making truly terrible choices – the nonsense could blur into white noise. Luckily, Hub Theatre's stated mission with this show is to make their audience "laugh loudly but think deeply," and with a cast of stellar actors and Bryn Boice's precisely calibrated direction, they had me doing both, often simultaneously, often without quite understanding how I'd gotten there.
Among that stellar cast, Siobhan Carroll stands out as Mrs. Smith (or at least, as the Mrs. Smith who opens The Bald Soprano, not to be confused with Jessica Golden's Mrs. Martin-turned-Mrs. Smith, and no, I'm not going to explain it any further than that). Never have I seen someone express such a convincing emotional range while keeping her face in a smile-slash-grimace so taut I could practically see the marionette strings. She’s proper, she’s frenetic, she’s horny for the Fire Chief (but who isn’t?), she’s barely keeping it together. I’m obsessed with Carroll’s performance and you should be too. Brooks Reeves, too, is excellent, particularly as the Professor in The Lesson. The moment when the play slides irrevocably into horror, powered by Reeves’ turn from pompous bloviations into pure, hypnotic psychopathy, made me gasp aloud. Of any actor, he also got the most laughs out of me, which is a dubious honor considering how loudly and disruptively I laugh. Hopefully I wasn’t too distracting.
Finally, I absolutely have to shout out the production team, particularly scenic designer Justin Lahue and sound designer Mackenzie Adamick, for the “Leave It To Beaver” gloss they put on the whole production. The impressively designed gigantic TV (with turnable knobs!) provided both the literal and metaphorical frame I needed to get my head around a show that could easily have been too confusing for a narrative-loving doofus like me to understand, and the mid-century music and advertising that cushioned both acts (not to mention the deeply ominous clock tolling) helped to lend the disjointed dialogue the feeling of rapid channel surfing. It took Ionesco’s overwhelming writing to the same realm as doomscrolling, which also helped The Lesson’s final political gut-punch feel warranted, if not quite smoothly integrated with the rest of the show. I want to see everything else this production team works on, because they know exactly how to use the look and sound of the stage to elevate the action.
The Bald Soprano & The Lesson runs until March 8, 2026, and tickets are pay-what-you-want. If you haven't gotten the chance yet, I implore you to see it while you still can, and then come back and re-read this review. It won't make any more sense than it did the first time around. I promise.
February 15, 2026 – Full disclosure: I’m a recovering Classics major. I love the Odyssey. I read Emily Wilson’s translation in one night (seriously) and read the poem again in Greek, some sections more than once. Classical reception is a touchy subject with me, and I have annoyingly, pretentiously high standards for mythological retellings. That said, I’m not impossible to impress, and adaptation offers a lot more flexibility than translation or straightforward attempts to retell a tale. I loved, for example, last year’s The Odyssey written by Kate Hamill and commissioned by the A.R.T. One of the best things about that production was its willingness to expand and explore characters who receive little development in the version of the epic that’s been transmitted to us over the centuries.
In addition to being an Odyssey lover, I’m also an Aimee Doherty stan. I have watched everything she’s been in since I moved to Boston. I loved her as Sherlock Holmes. I loved her as Dolly Gallagher Levi. Whatever gene gay men have that makes us squeal at the top of our lungs for Cher or Madonna or Lady Gaga makes me seriously consider starting an Aimee Doherty fan site on a regular basis. A one-woman musical starring Aimee Doherty as Penelope, recounting her side of the Odyssey, is absolute catnip for me personally.
It’s a shame about the script.
I have nothing but admiration for Doherty’s singing (gorgeous belting, heartfelt without being cheesy) and acting (jaded, funny, filled with yearning). I’m very impressed by Courtney O’Connor’s direction (dramatic and emotional; leaning into Penelope’s pendulum swings and keeping the action perfectly in sync with the music). I thought the songs were catchy and the lyricism serviceable. The band was great, particularly Kett Lee’s mood-setting violoncello. The best moment of the play, for me, came when all of these threads twined perfectly in "Drunk Iliad." Penelope offered a front-row audience member a stiff drink and recounted the entire Trojan War in three-ish minutes of snarky, tipsy, one-liner-y, earworm-y musical banter. I was hooked.
But, for reasons I cannot fathom even as someone picky about the accuracy of my classical reimaginings, the script seemed afraid to say anything about Penelope, or allow her to say anything about herself, that the Odyssey doesn’t already say. Penelope is by herself in Ithaca for twenty years, ruling despite the intensely misogynistic cultural forces working against her, battling unruly suitors and raising a son and managing an entire island (or city? The modern-ish setting is kept somewhat nebulous) all by herself. The audience doesn’t get to watch her do any of that. Instead, the story begins the literal day before Odysseus comes home. The audience doesn’t even really get to hear her explain what she's been up to for the past two decades other than passing references to having lots of “work to do.” Instead, Penelope spends probably 60 minutes of this 80-minute show singing about how much she’d like her husband and son to come home and how much easier things will hopefully be once the men in her life have returned. Sometimes she sings about how she maybe doesn’t want them to come home and would instead like to live life on her own terms. Once, she sings about how she’s just about to stop waiting and start living. And then, instead of doing that, Odysseus comes home, at which point she sings about how they’re going to have a long conversation in the morning once he’s had his rest. Notably, the show ends before that conversation.
The audience is left in the exact same position as Penelope: waiting desperately for something interesting to happen, only for the climactic moment to never quite arrive. Maybe that was intentional on the part of the writing team, but if so, I’m afraid they wasted the opportunity to let Penelope tell her side of the story, or even to tell a story, or really to do anything but yearn for something, anything, besides what the script has given her. When I walked out of the theater after what was, I cannot stress enough, a one-woman show, my honest first thought was, man, I wish they’d given her more to do.
Penelope runs until March 1, 2026, and tickets start at $25.