Boston's Best Student Theater

With low ticket costs and choice repertoires of classic, modern, and original work, Boston's student theater offers audiences a desirable alternative to our professional companies. Volunteer casts and crew often make student theater the opportunity to see plays that require large casts; professional companies tend to stick to material with slimmer personnel demands to keep production costs down.

Academic atmospheres and the lack of fiscal reliance on ticket sales and individual giving makes for novel programming that wouldn't be sustainable in other environments. These picks represent some of the most underrated theater in Boston. - Bryce Lambert

HRDC

www.hrdctheater.com

As an umbrella organization for student theater at Harvard, HRDC oversees undergraduate productions in the Loeb Drama Center as well as other campus venues. Most shows are small productions in the Loeb's experimental black box theater, but each semester features two, usually phenomenal, large-scale productions on the Loeb mainstage.

A.R.T. Institute

www.americanrepertorytheater.org

A great deal of talent passes through the American Repertory Theater's graduate program in advanced theater training and you're likely to see students cast in A.R.T. mainstage shows. Less well known are the A.R.T. Institute's own productions, offered at substantially reduced ticket prices outside of the regular subscription series. These edgy and typically well produced and acted plays have short runs, so be sure to mark your calendars when they come up.

Boston University College of Fine Arts

www.bu.edu/cfa/theatre

Boston University produces a sporadic season of student theater that includes an annual fall Fringe Festival, where the School of Theater joins up with the School of Music's Opera Institute for a festival that merges theater, recital, and opera. Huntington subscribers receive special discounts on tickets.

Boston Conservatory

www.bostonconservatory.edu

For student musical theater, the Boston Conservatory is a sure thing. Cleverly staged productions are usually well sung and choreographed and drawn from a musical theater repertoire more interesting than anything else in town. A new campus theater has been providing these shows with a much improved space to scintillate.