Artistic Director Diane Paulus is "one of the hottest voices in the American theater scene today." — WBUR, Here and Now
"The most exciting season Boston theater has seen in years...an example of what other theaters around the country could, should, and must be doing as well." — Hartford Courant
"Diane Paulus is going to make a splash in the respected but relatively conventional world of Boston theater." — The Improper Bostonian
"Roll over Shakespeare, and text Fitzgerald the news." — Boston Phoenix
"In the first season she has programmed as Artistic Director for the American Repertory Theater, Diane Paulus is trying something dramatically different: she's turning Zero Arrow Theatre into a dance club, she's planning a show that involves audiences walking in masks and capes through an abandoned building, she's featuring a production that is 7 ½ hours long, and she's offering a world premiere about the Boston Red Sox." — Boston Globe
"New York caught napping: Punchdrunk comes to Cambridge... Lame, New York. Very lame." — Time Out, New York
“Dark. Very dark. Beautiful. Disturbing. Provocative. Hilarious. Chilling. Engrossing. Chicago Opera Theater has scored another triumph with its new production of Don Giovanni, the last of the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy to be taken up by the company's superb partnership of conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus.” — Chicago Sun-Times, May 2008
“Director Diane Paulus does a stunning job. Her designers turn the Young Vic into a neon-lit installation: four giant video screens filtering both live and pre-filmed images around a suspended Plexiglas box from which descends a white spiral staircase – the stairway to and from psychosis, mission control for Lynch's weird and wonderful imaginings.” Lost Highway — The London Independent, April 2008
“The Public Theater produced just three raucous and perfectly heartbreaking performances in Central Park in September. It was a 40th anniversary of what turns out to have been a surprisingly resilient and tragically timely musical. The Public did not want reviews for what turned out to be one of the memorable experiences of the year. The production deserved to live on. So sorry you missed it.” HAIR – The Top 10 in Theater — Newsday, January 2008
“...director and adaptor Diane Paulus has managed to put on a splendid, moving show.... In Another Country, Paulus brings out the humanity of a group of troubled people in a troubled country. " — Greenwich Village Gazette, November 2007
“Another Country is a history lesson of life in America, one that is filled with outrage, brutal honesty and searing passion.” — Columbia News, November 2007
“The adrenaline rush at the Bay Street Theatre is as immediate as watching a smack down on 'Wrestle Mania' in its production of the musical cum tournament, Turandot: Rumble for the Ring. The show features a center stage arena, overhead screens for riveting close-ups, a barking M.C., a pair of comic commentators, and mini-skirt-clad blondes cavorting about and exhorting the crowd. This is an event for sports fans, rock fanatics, multitaskers, the A.D.D. generation, and, yes, lovers of traditional musical theater. From the start-up sing-along of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' to the fight finale, few theater pieces, let alone opera-based, legend-inspired remakes, have worked so hard at engaging an audience and succeeded so well.” — The East Hampton Star, July 2007
“Paulus has made the highly stylized conceits of early Italian Baroque opera feel as fresh to modern ears as the tangy, colorful continuity of sounds Glover, working from her own edition of the score, elicits from her fine period-instruments orchestra. Together they inspire a large, mostly young ensemble to make the words and notes of this text-driven opera really matter to us. The result is living, breathing drama that speaks with a contemporary voice.” The Return of Ulysses — Chicago Tribune, March 2007
“For her superb staging of The Turn of the Screw, Paulus stripped the stage bare to the back wall, leaving the characters to wander surreally through a carpet of funereal white lilies; the resultant permeability of actual versus theatrical reality perfectly reflected the disintegration of the protagonist’s mind, her haunting cries of ‘lost, lost’ pealing with eerie poignancy in this created environment. In quite another vein, the cynical decadence of Nero’s court in Monteverdi’s Poppea was searingly captured by gilding the production with ostentatious, Vegas-inspired glitz; Seneca’s death was splashed across the tabloids like so much glitterati gossip.” — Opera News, August 2006
“It’s our old friend Figaro, all right, done up in the authentic musical style and delicious theatricality that have marked Chicago Opera Theater's four previous collaborations by conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus. Moving the action from 18th-Century Seville to Clinton-era Florida, Paulus reminds us how contemporary Mozart's serious comedy of Eros really is. As with her witty Cosi Fan Tutte for COT in 2002, the director has two couples facing some painful emotional truths and learning that trust, honesty and fidelity never come cheap. Even if you've seen Figaro scores of times, COT's dream cast and a delightful production make this a wedding you simply must attend.” — Chicago Tribune, May 2005
“Conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus have given us a bold contemporary perspective on this Baroque masterpiece that leaps across the centuries with astonishing immediacy. . . . The Monteverdi Orfeo Glover and Paulus put together for COT in 2000 was a model of how old operatic wine can be poured into shiny new bottles; so is their Poppea. Robert Brill's spare sets, David C. Woolard's modern costuming and Allen Hahn's stark lighting draw telling parallels between the sleazy hedonism of Nero's palace and the glitzy vulgarity of a Vegas pleasure dome… as close to flawless as a production can be: admirably sung and acted, imaginatively staged and stylishly performed by a dream ensemble of period instruments under Glover's direction.” — Chicago Tribune, February 2004
“Paulus and Glover are working their magic again…using minimal sets and retaining the 19th-century English country setting of James' story, COT's Turn of the Screw takes us into a world as familiar as a Jane Austen novel or a Merchant-Ivory film, yet as disorienting as a fog-shrouded Impressionist landscape…. Britten's tale of two orphaned children menaced by the ghosts of their dead governess, Miss Jessel, and a mysterious man-servant, Peter Quint, becomes an engrossing swirl of reality and fantasy, unbounded goodness and absolute malevolence.” — Chicago Tribune, March 2003
“It's a delight, beginning to end.” Swimming with Watermelons — The New Yorker, April 2002
“She strives to create a communal environment in the rehearsal hall. Her approach generates work that lives in the actors’ body and projects a high emotional energy; her musicals are often punctured by dance-like scenes that grip an audience’s attention and sweep them up in a whirlwind of energy.
Paulus’ dedication to the ensemble environment gives her productions the sense of being assembled by a group of dear friends who are, if nothing else, enthusiastic about theatre — a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland hey-let’s-put-on-a-show atmosphere. What audiences see and remember, however, is something far more sophisticated and precise. When Paulus conjures up a place — a ’70s disco in The Donkey Show, her Gen-X version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; or a World War II-era auditorium crowded with GI’s in Swimming with Watermelons, based in part on the true-life experiences of her parents — she guides her company’s movements so skillfully that, even without a set, the location in all its dimensions is crystal clear. Her approach is similar to a dance in that way: bodies create environments, not just character." — American Theatre, January 2002
“Paulus, in her operatic directing debut, sets the aboveground action in a brilliant all-white drawing room where the passionate lovers are surrounded by masked revelers at a high-society ball. After Orfeo travels down to Hades to rescue his dead wife, he finds her at the banquet table of Plutone dressed in a red silk smoking jacket . . . the stage is alive with fluid, stylized movement that takes its dramatic cues from the gut strings and valveless brasses in the pit.” — Chicago Tribune, October 2000
“If music be the food of love, The Donkey Show is a bowl of jalapenos. This rollicking hour of sex, drugs and sweaty gyrations marries the 70’s disco craze to, of all things, the work of William Shakespeare.” — New York Times, August 1999
“Based on the moving poetry of Cornelius Eady and the plaintive, sweet-and-sour music of the jazz composer Diedre Murray, Running Man occupies a category of theater all its own. Operating at the exotic juncture where chamber musical, jazz session and opera might converge, the piece, performed spectacularly by a cast of six and a five member orchestra, taps a well of feeling so deep at times it seems spiritual. By no means is this a conventional musical — there are no show tunes in this show — but it shares with the successful versions of more mainstream forms an eloquence in structure and storytelling.” — New York Times, March 1999
