How I Learned To Drive
Century Center Theater

Paula Vogel is a playwright who doesn't shrink from issues, as is quite evident in her Off-Broadway hit, How I Learned To Drive, now in an open-ended run at the new Century Theatre in New York City. The much acclaimed work, which among other honors took the 1997 Drama Desk Award for Best Play, is a politically incorrect -- as well as sexually-themed and controversial -- comedy. The much underrated Bruce Davison, who through the years has proven as at home on-stage as he is on-screen, shines as Peck.

Ellis Nassour
Date Reviewed:
October 1997
Phantom Of The Opera, The
Majestic Theater

Credit Andrew Lloyd Webber with creating -- from initial concept to the composing -- what has grown to become a timeless masterpiece in The Phantom Of The Opera, which in January celebrated a milestone on Broadway with its 10th Anniversary. And credit the creative team -- director Harold Prince, musical director David Caddick, designer Maria Bjornson, and lyricists Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe for a mesmerizing production. But especially credit the musical staging by choreographer Gillian Lynne!

Ellis Nassour
Date Reviewed:
October 1997
Les Miserables
Imperial Theater

Among my other weaknesses as a reviewer, I have a blind spot for musicals. I usually enjoy musicals that other critics trash, while I underestimate shows that they, and audiences, thoroughly embrace.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1997
Cats
Winter Garden Theater

On June 19, 1997, Cats becomes one for the history books -- and you remember how dull history books were. Up and down Shubert Alley, theater in-crowds were gnashing their teeth as Cats surpassed the beloved Chorus Line to become the longest running Broadway show in history (6,138 performances). A third look at the feline phenomenon showed Cats to be what it's always been: incredibly innovative in costume and design, surprisingly successful in theatricalizing an impossible concept (shaping a commercial musical out of T.S.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
June 1997
Forever Tango
Walter Kerr Theater

In the case of Luis Bravo's Forever Tango at the Walter Kerr Theater, it takes 16 to tango. And, boy, can they! One might think, if you've seen one tango, you've seen them all. Well, you ain't seen nothing yet (as they say, down Argentine way); there are vibrant surprises in store at Forever Tango. The tango is a traditional dance, dominated by specific steps and moves (always below the waist), and there are many traditional elements in Forever Tango. It's the not so traditional ones that bring shouts of the show's creator's name -- Bravo!

Ellis Nassour
Date Reviewed:
June 1997
Jekyll And Hyde
Plymouth Theater

Throughout its seven-year trip to Broadway, Jekyll & Hyde has become the musical critics love to hate. They bash the Frank Wildhorn-Leslie Bricusse show for its rudimentary lyrics, pop-music sensationalism and episodic structure. Valid as the gripes may be, these complainers end up focusing on a few gawky trees and missing the dark, inviting forest. There really is no need for a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson's story of good battling evil -- except to give an actor a juicy role and an audience a thrilling ride.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1997
Bed And Sofa
Goldman Theater of Morris Cafritz Center

Last season I was privileged to see the production of  this "silent movie opera" at New York's Vineyard Theater. I was so impressed I hesitated to attend the inaugural production at the Morris Cafritz Center for the Arts in Washington's lavishly renovated Jewish Community Center. No need for faint heart. Artistic Director Hoeflich has directed an exquisite show.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
January 1997
Cigarettes And Chocolate
Olney Theater Center

The cold winter that has gripped Washington is not more biting than the voice of the Potomac Theater Project, back with works designed to illuminate "the nightmares and hoaxes by which we live." These never-say-die radicals have earned a loyal audience, who for nearly a decade followed the peripatetic troupe from space to space. As of 1995, when Co-Producer Jim Petosa was named Artistic Director of the Olney Theater, PTP had a home. The three producers, each of whom directs one play per season, have opted to stage their shows in unconventional locations on Olney's grounds.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
January 1997
Closet Land
Olney Theater Center

The advisory posted in the lobby stated "Absolutely no children will be admitted." Midway through the show, I wished I qualified, so I could be home safely watching the game. Closet Land is hard on spectators and apparently painful for the actors as well, since the curtain call found them with wet eyes and tense faces. Within the intimate space, there was no escaping the intensity of the brutal interrogation withstood by the Woman (a delicately lovely Shannon Parks) from her tormentor, the Man (Paul Morella, malevolently alternating between good and bad cop).

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
January 1997
Cryptogram, The
Studio Theater

The Cryptogram was Artistic Director Zinoman's non-sugar plum entry into the Christmas season. I'm not certain which I found more depressing - the flu that kept me from attending opening night, or this tragic story of family dysfunction.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
January 1997
Antony and Cleopatra
Shakespeare Theater - Lansburgh

When the Romans entered, wearing high boots and World War II uniforms, I wasn't certain whether I was watching Antony and Cleopatra or the stage version of "Casablanca." If it had been the second, there might at least have been some hope of romance. Sparks. Chemistry. All of which are necessary to understand why Antony would, as Scarus said, have "kissed away kingdoms and provinces" for love of his Egyptian queen. All of which are absent between Helen Carey as Cleopatra and Tom Hewitt as Antony, who declaim rather than enact their passion.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
December 1996
Damn Yankees
Kennedy Center

I have never been a fan of Jerry Lewis, but as Applegate in Damn Yankees, he gives a devil of a performance. On opening night at the Kennedy Center, the audience gave him his due - a cheering, standing ovation. As with legend Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, this was as much a tribute to the grit and determination of the artist (starring in his first Broadway role at the age of 70) as to his talent.

Barbara Gross
Date Reviewed:
December 1996
Chicago
Ambassador Theater

It's hard to tell which aspect of Chicago makes us feel more nostalgic, the look of Bob Fosse's rhythmic, pelvic choreography; the ricky-ticky jazziness of its archetypal Kander and Ebb score; or simply the fact that in 1975, when Chicago first hit Broadway, America wasn't yet ready to believe that a cold-blooded murderer with a good lawyer could get away with everything. Now Chicago's cynicism feels almost quaint. We don't need to be told the media attacks every scandal in a feeding frenzy and then drops the carcass when another meal appears.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 1996
Boys in the Band, The
Lucille Lortel Theater

Happy and gay. Which is not the same as gay and happy -- two words that, at least in theater terms, can be as far apart as Pat Buchanan and tolerance. It was 1968, before AIDS, before Torch Song Trilogy, before Stonewall -- and Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band hit the New York theater scene. For a thousand performances at off-Broadway’s Theater Four, seven gay characters gathered at Michael’s New York apartment to celebrate the birthday of their outrageous mutual friend, Harold.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 1996
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
Westside Theater - Upstairs

Once upon a time, long, long ago in the American theater, boys met girls instead of boys. These boys and girls -- back then we called them "couples" -- would flirt, fight, and sing about everything in witty couplets. It was all very quaint and familiar, mildly pandering to cliches but generally honest -- and invariably hopeful -- about the nature of twosomes. Since boy/girl musicals have little place on the Rialto these days, we've had to settle for a spate of musical revues, most of them about the singles scene.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
August 1996
Rent
Nederlander Theater

It was the year's Cinderella story -- with a tragic turn: Rent, an off-off-Broadway rock musical with no "stars" and a virtually unknown author, moves to Broadway, wins the Pulitzer, garners rave reviews, standing o's and more awards, and does so only weeks after said composer/lyricist dies of a brain aneurysm at age 35. Little wonder Rent is considered this year's musical phenomenon, a little engine that not only could but electrified as it hurtled along.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
Buried Child
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Odd, but whereas the dread and loathing of A Delicate Balance (which also won the Pulitzer Prize at its premiere) makes me shrug my shoulders and wonder whether its meaninglessness is worth the effort, Buried Child, Sam Shepard’s 1979 essay on familial rot, tickles my funnybone and keeps me engrossed up to the final, famous image.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
Big: The Musical
Shubert Theater

It’s big...and it’s good. For a while now my colleagues and I have been complaining about the dearth of imagination on Broadway, wherein new musicals -- which used to rely on novels for their storylines -- now turn to the movies for their ideas.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea
City Center - Stage 1

I just got back from Miami Beach and its justifiably famous seashore, but even there the sands aren’t as white and inviting as the sand on Michael McGarty’s set for By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea. McGarty even gives us a starlit night backdrop to complete the picture of an idyllic beachscape where three unrelated one-acts, all directed by Leonard Foglia, all featuring Timothy Carhart, Lee Brock, and Mary Beth Fisher, take place.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
Arts and Leisure
Playwrights Horizons

It’s just as well Steve Tesich’s latest drama at Playwrights Horizons isn’t any good; if it were, it would probably put me in therapy for a decade. Arts & Leisure is an externalized, interior monologue for a theater critic.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
May 1996
Bring in `Da Noise, Bring in `Da Funk
Ambassador Theater

What better way to tap into the roots of black American history than with tap itself, a dance form that affords freedom in its movement, anger in its staccato, sadness in its sweeps, and hope in its rhythms? The conceit for Bring in `Da Noise, Bring in `Da Funk weds a potent theme -- the 300-year journey from slave ships to street corners -- with choreographed numbers that incorporate tap into slice-of-life vignettes.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1996
Beauty and the Beast
Palace Theater

[Reviewed at the Palace Theater] If it's "a tale as old as time," why does it need amplification loud enough to stop a clock? That's an exaggeration, but the first act of Beauty and the Beast, a stage adaptation of the Disney film musical, barrels out at us in waves of tinny sound, the performers fighting the overmiked orchestra just to be heard. Perhaps sound designer T. Richard Fitzgerald and director Robert Jess Roth want to create a wall of aural packaging to drown out an audience with more than a few youngsters in it.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 1996
Fantasticks, The
Sullivan Street Playhouse

Three was not the charm when I returned for a third visit to New York's only 36-year-old current musical, The Fantasticks, still ensconced in the Sullivan Street Playhouse, still packing in crowds of young teens and seniors with long memories. It's about a boy and a girl, of course, and the two fathers who keep them apart with the express interest of getting them together. Papas Hucklebee and Bellomy hire a dashing bandito to aid their scheme, which works brilliantly -- except "happily ever after" isn't always what it seems.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1996
Distant Fires
Stamford Theater Works

Distant Fires deals with black and white issues derived from sharply drawn characters, not polemic. Danger and hopelessness hang over the construction crew -- five men at work atop a ten-story building in Ocean City, Maryland, in the heat of the summer. On a marvel of a set, the actors speak their lines, quite eloquently, while actually pouring and spreading cement, actually recreating the duties of laborers. Three of the workers are black.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
February 1996
Annie Get Your Gun
Drury Lane Theater

The plot resolution -- the heroine deliberately losing a contest for love of a man who won't have her any other way -- presents problems for our egalitarian society, but Irving Berlin's score for Annie Get Your Gun remains irresistible. And once the Drury Lane ensemble demonstrate that they can sell "No Business Like Show Business" as if it were written only yesterday, we have full confidence they can pull off the rest. And they do.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 1996
Blithering Heights: The Improvised English Gothic Romance
Ivanhoe Theater

Blithering Heights is another of the full-length improv offerings by The Free Associates, this one in the style of the Bronte Sisters. The evening I watched, they worked with audience suggestions to come up with heroine Catherine Milton, in love with Hunter, a man whose family business was secretly running a bordello. The family who take care of Catherine (by turning her into a servant and convincing her she was ugly and going bald) try to keep her from meeting the hero by locking her in the cellar.

Effie Mihopoulos
Date Reviewed:
January 1996
Caine Mutiny Court Martial, The
A Red Orchid Theater

When is the overthrow of authority justified, what is the responsibility of the individual to blow the whistle, and who profits -- always, who profits? Herman Wouk posed those questions in 1950 within the microcosm of a court-martial trial for a mutiny aboard an American warship. The 1954 movie version drowned any possible controversy in a flood of spectacle and sentimentality, but director Wilson Milam and an all-star ensemble or intensely committed actors delve into the ambiguities of the original material.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 1996
Father, The
Roundabout Theater

Take away a man's last vestige of pride and identity, Strindberg seems to say, and you drive him headlong into madness. Such is the direct thematic line of The Father, a psychodrama that still shocks and agitates nearly 110 years after its first publication. Beset by the women in his house, each of whom has a different approach to raising his daughter, Captain Adolf finds solace in the male hierarchy of his military duties.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 1996
How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying
Richard Rodgers Theater

A secretary may not be a toy, but if you're Des McAnuff, a Broadway show is. McAnuff and designer John Arnone go all-out to turn this revival of How To Succeed into something out of FAO Schwartz -- all movement, eye-popping colors, sound and silliness. That it works, mmm.. 90% of the time, is a credit first and foremost to Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock & Willie Gilbert's miraculous book, one which, even played perfectly straight, could only offend the most humorless feminists.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 1996
Charley's Aunt
Candlelight's Forum Theater

It is easy to imagine a troupe of collegiate players devouring this venerable antique with gusto, wringing maximum fun from the quaint language and manners, as well as the pivotal man-in-a-dress gag, until Brandon Thomas' vintage romantic comedy sparkled like new.  Unfortunately, the Forum cast are seasoned professionals, veterans of countless Plautian bedroom farces -- and it shows. 

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 1995
Crazy For You
Country Dinner Playhouse

Crazy For You has been drastically reduced in size and spectacle to fit the Country Dinner Playhouse's arena stage, but the music, and one exceptional performance, save the show.

Patrick Rainville Dorn
Date Reviewed:
November 1995
Master Class
John Golden Theater

In his late, lamented opera show on New York's WKCR-FM, Stefan Zucker and his call-in listeners were constantly torn between the merits of expressive singing and pure Bel Canto loveliness. Even for these opera buffs, Maria Callas was an acquired taste, thrilling in her best moments, shrill and ululating in her worst, but most precious for what she represented: opera as a way of style, of purity, of life.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 1995
Blue Man Group
Charles Playhouse

In Tubes, Blue Man Group offers a frenetic clown show, exploring competition, conformity and technology with an anti-intellectualism that pooh-poohs art criticism even as it invites analysis. It's mask work—three blue, bald, silent heads with the timing of the Russian clowns. Their understated mime looks effortless, but there's careful analysis behind it. If you don't dig one element of their work, you'll dig another. They lunge at the information superhighway with metaphors on screen, and make audience members feel like Alice at the mad tea party.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
October 1995
Death Of A Salesman
Raven Theater

So much attention has been paid to Willy Loman as Tragic Hero, we often forget that he is, as the play's title states, a salesman -- kin to the cynical shysters of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and the butt of countless jokes trading on his ancestral stereotypes. Tom Higgins' Willy is a salesman first, however; a gladhander brimming with bluster and bonhommie.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 1995
Alice
Brooklyn Academy of Music

What with Calvin Klein forced to remove their nubile waifs and wafers from the sides of buses because of their “troubling” sexuality, this may be just the time to consider Charles Dodgson and his photographic obsession with a girl named Alice. Of course, Dodgson kept it in his pants—and on the page, his letters to Alice burned by her mother. But the book he wrote as one “Lewis Carroll” has inspired more adaptations than perhaps any other work of fanciful fiction.

"Alice in Wonderland," like all picaresque adventures, has its pluses and minuses as a dramatic vehicle.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1995
Dangerous Corner
Atlantic Theater

The only thing dangerous about this production of Dangerous Corner is the way it turns the play’s malevolent irony into a sarcastic joke, second-guessing the audience’s laughter at J.B. Priestley’s often improbably revelations by staging each pronouncement with arch body language punctuating stilted dialogue. David Mamet doesn’t just fall into this trap, he leaps in, director’s manual first. He spreads the cast out across the Atlantic Theater’s vast stage, robbing Priestley’s cocktail-party-turned-murder-mystery of its tension.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
October 1995
Armando Diaz Experience, The
ImprovOlympic

Improv, by its very nature, is risky. Even strong performers have good nights and bad ones.  The night I saw The Armando Diaz Experience, Theatrical Movement & Hootenanny was an off-night for what seems to be a good improv cast. Uninspired, the troupe fell back on subjects that bring easy laughs: B-movies and an audience's titillation with adolescent sex fixations.

Effie Mihopoulos
Date Reviewed:
September 1995
Cast On A Hot Tin Roof
Ivanhoe Theater

The Free Associates celebrated their fourth anniversary of Cast On A Hot Tin Roof; four years of improvising plays in the manner of Tennessee Williams from on the spot audience suggestions. They do this exceptionally well, which is probably why they still have an audience for their tailor-made plays "not by Tennessee Williams" (as they state in the program notes).  So closely in his spirit do they follow, you could almost swear you're seeing a new, posthumously unearthed tidbit Williams wrote and tucked into a drawer. 

Effie Mihopoulos
Date Reviewed:
August 1995
Defending the Caveman
Helen Hayes Theater

So much of what's on Broadway is opulent to the point of being over-produced, it's invariably nice to come across a down-dressed, lower-key evening of intelligent comedy. Rob Becker's Defending The Caveman fits the bill in many ways; Becker's monologue offers a lot of amusing material about the basic differences between men and women, and he has a malleable face that can go from couch potato to Cro-magnon in seconds flat.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1995
Smokey Joe's Café: The Songs of Leiber & Stoller
Virginia Theater

There's an idea behind Smokey Joe's Cafe - do as many Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller rock and roll songs as you possibly can in two hours - but there isn't really a concept. That's why director Jerry Zaks and choreographer Joey McKneely will give some numbers a theatrical "story," while the rest of the time they'll drop any pretense of an overall style and just let the talented cast step out and sing.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 1995

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