Media Archive

Tango is not just a dance in director Sergio Trujillo’s “Arrabal.” It’s a life force. This purgative piece of dance theater reinvents the tango and is at once sexy, soul-shattering, and, ultimately, cathartic.

At the heart of “Arrabal,” of course, is the tango, which threads together the story loosely told through dramatic movement, going forward in time then flashing back to the horrible years of the dictatorship. The dancing is gorgeous, robust and erotic, nothing short of marvelous.

It is of course the dancing that matters most, and this is accomplished by a troupe that clearly knows what it is about. If this is the kind of experience you’ve enjoyed in previous dance pieces, you won’t be disappointed.

Like tango itself, the show intimately acquaints you with the most powerful emotions, from despair to sensuality. And it will make you want to undo buttons.

New American Repertory Theater show explores the legacy of Argentina’s brutal military regime through music and dance.

Arrabal, which the American Repertory Theater is bringing to the Loeb Drama Center for a five-week run, is a tango musical with a story to tell, and with a distinguished creative team.

John Lithgow can’t get enough of the Boston arts scene.

For over 40 years, John Weidman has been responsible for some of musical theater’s most complex and daring works. He has made a career out of writing the kind of theater that shatters expectations, revolutionizes structure, and stimulates the mind as much as the soul.

“Arrabal” is life, death, and sex in a whirl of arms and legs, heart and soul, pain and catharsis, dancers weaving in and out among the audience.

Underneath the revealing dresses and the lightning-fast footwork, the message of the show is one of a fierce country that refuses to be put down.

A dark-edged, tango-infused musical about the desaparecidos in Argentina makes its American debut.

It may be relatively early in the 2017 theater season, but it seems highly unlikely that anything you will see on Boston stages (or anywhere else) this year will pack the kind of visual, aural and emotional wallop that Arrabal – now making its United States premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge – will deliver to the senses.