Fantasticks, The
Boulevard Ensemble Theater

 Few chestnuts have weathered the seasons better than The Fantasticks, a musical fable about life and young love. Even now, 40 years after its debut, it continues to charm with its tuneful balance of innocence and wisdom. Perhaps it's fitting that The Fantasticks arrives in Milwaukee not long after its final Manhattan performance (the longest-running play there ended its 40-year run on January 13, 2002). With its signature song, "Try to Remember," The Fantasticks reminds us how our own follies have shaped us into the adults we have become.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
October 2002
Fantasticks, The
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

 Few shows can boast as proud a heritage as The Fantasticks. It debuted in an Off-Broadway playhouse in 1960. Audience numbers grew over time, and eventually, this show became the longest-running musical in history. Its appeal, though elusive to some, has drawn more spectators than Cats, A Chorus Line, The Lion King or any number of mega-musicals you can name.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2003
Far Away
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

 Written prior to 9/11, Caryl Churchill's searing Far Away is almost certain to recall the confusion, fear and horror that rocked America on that day. The same unsettling feeling pervades the world of Far Away, which has been aptly described by another critic as a "nightmare fable." Indeed, it has all the trappings of a nightmare. It starts with a young girl in a white nightgown telling her aunt about a strange and disturbing scene she witnessed earlier in the evening. We never find out exactly why the girl is staying at her aunt's house.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
November 2004
Far East
Westport Country Playhouse

 Finally, a play! A. R. Gurney's Far East, originally produced at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts and presented at Lincoln Center earlier this year, is a rewarding piece of theater inspired by the plot of the opera, "Madame Butterfly," and the James Jones novel and film, "From Here to Eternity." Drama is chaos with control, and Gurney, who has written more than 25 plays, demonstrates the art of not only creating original material, but masterfully shaping it.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Far East
Florida Studio Theater - mainstage

 Culturally, East -- specifically Japan -- is as far as can be from the "normal," Midwest country club world of Lt."Sparky" Watts. Having fallen in love with a young Japanese who waits tables at his newly-assigned base, 1954, he's trying to "Orient" himself. Enthusiastic Jason Kuykendall gentles a bit the brash WASP whose military stint began as an entrance qualification for Harvard Business School.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, The
First Unitarian Universalist Church

Prolific playwright Paul Rudnick has entertained audiences with Jeffrey, I Hate Hamlet, "The Stepford Wives," and now The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told. The current production, under the able direction of Geoffrey A. Cox, is a charming, albeit long, interpretation of the script.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Far From The Madding Crowd
Lifeline Theater

 Her name is our first hint that Bathsheba Everdene is a woman of passions, a trait attracting her three suitors -- one seeking to exploit them, another, to protect her from them, and a third, to wait patiently for her to discover for herself the folly of allowing one's actions to be governed by romantic impulse.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Fast and Loose
Actors Theater of Louisville

 For this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, the customary dramatic anthology that showcases ATL's Apprentice Company has been created jointly by four playwrights under the title "Fast and Loose: An Ethical Collaboration." Jose Cruz Gonzalez, Kirsten Greenidge (whose satirical full-length play, Sans-culottes in the Promised Land, is a highlight of the festival), Julie Marie Myatt, and John Walch started with these four questions involving ethics, according to program notes: "If you found out a terrible secret that might hurt the ones you lov

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2004
Fat Lady Sings, The
Theater Works

 Draped shoulders to toes in shiny swirls on black falling as if from epaulettes, she might be Kate Smith imparting Irving Berlin's blessing of America. Carol A. Provonsha's voice is bit higher and hair blonder, though. The cascades of cloth turn out to be drapes when returned to her entrance arch. But Kate is definitely Provonsha's model in the sense of her inspiration as a performer of size. And of sex? As a Catholic schoolgirl, Provonsha -- whose mother costumed drag queens and brother was one -- met Sophie Tucker and also saw Mae West in person.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
Fat Men in Skirts
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

 Sometimes, a good play is judged by whether it makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time. However, Bialystock and Bloom goes one better in its production of Nicky Silver's Fat Men in Skirts. In this case, the audience often wants to laugh, cry and throw up -- simultaneously! This is accomplished when two of the play's characters, a mother and her tweenage son, resort to cannabalism after they survive a plane wreck.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Fatal Attraction
Scripps Ranch - Legler Benbough Theater

 Do not think "Fatal Attraction" -- the movie. Do think of a potentially fatal femme fatale, that very special woman that can twist both man and woman to do her will.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
Fault Line - April Offering
Fault Line Theater

 Fault Line is back on line with four more one-acts.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Fault Line - Four One-Acts
Fault Line Theater

 Fault Line is one of the few theaters in town that give aspiring actors and playwrights their first exposure. In fact, scripts come all the way from an agent in New York for production and feedback to his clients. Most of their productions are multi-scene plays running around 30 minutes. It's an interesting form, allowing a full-length story to be told usually by short scenes - some, mere snippets - in the time period. It can also be disconcerting if scenes are too short.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
Fault Line - June One-Acts
Fault Line Theater

 This small, storefront theater, though a black box, adds new and flexible set pieces with each new run. Some of the young actors are in more than one production, giving us a chance to see their ability to take on new roles.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
Fault Line - September/October Offering
Fault Line Theater

Debbie Fabiano's eternally yours [sic] explores the accidental deaths of Vincent and Susan Tarezzio (Ted Falagan and Alicia Wright) and their subsequent traditional Italian wake. The stereotypically squabbling couple and their dog Tippy, en route to a vacation destination, are more intent on arguing than watching the road. Micha Hamilton's Mama Tarezzio is right on, an authentic grieving Italian mom. Kevin Hettinger plays brother Dominic, dramatically overbearing and occasionally over projecting. Orrick Smith's off-stage voice booms with authority.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2001
Fences
Ranch at Legler Benbough Theater at USIU

Troy Maxson speaks from his gut. Life has not been easy on him, nor has he been easy on life. His home is in a Pittsburgh ghetto, where he lives with his wife and youngest son. He is a sincere man, a driven man, and he rules his family with a heavy hand. He builds fences around his small plot of land, fences to keep people out and, quite possibly, to keep the family in.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Fences
Asolo Theater

 Like his weathered, old, wooden big-city house, Troy Maxson is stressed out. Death always seems to him ready for a confrontation. Years back, he'd become a near-pro baseball player in prison. As an ex-con African-American, his time to hit the big leagues hadn't come. It later passed him by. Damned if he's going to let his boy Cory play football in high school, even if that might lead him to college. He wouldn't have a chance at sports unless twice as good as white players.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2007
Festival of Independent Theaters
Bath House Cultural Center

 The greatest drawback to the 4th annual Festival of Independent Theaters (FIT), now playing through August 3, 2002 at the Bath House Cultural Center on White Rock Lake, is that it is not juried, resulting in an anything-goes policy. With nine companies performing in blocks of twos and threes in repertory over four weekends, FIT, while hosting three wonderful productions, reflects the unevenness of material and directing and is not yet ready for prime time.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
July 2002
Festival of Independent Theaters - Evening 4
Bath House Cultural Center

 The sixth annual Festival of Independent Theaters (FIT), a group of 10 companies without a permanent venue, close their 24-day run August 5-7, 2004 at the Bath House Cultural Center on White Rock Lake. Events include eight one-act plays, two multi-media presentations, and numerous pre and post-show events. The cross-pollination among these companies could also make FIT an acronym for Festival of Incestuous Theaters, which can be a double-edged sword.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Festival of Independent Theaters - Evening 1
Bath House Cultural Center

The eighth annual Festival of Independent Theatres' (FIT) kicked off their opening weekend July 14, 2006 and presented many diverse offerings by five of the eight participating companies.

Theatergoers can always count on WingSpan Theater Company producer Susan Sargeant to come up with little-known, rarely staged, but always excellent scripts. She then hand picks her cast and director, which results in wonderfully staged work and top-notch talent. This year's FIT entry is no exception, Something Unspoken by Tennessee Williams, directed by Gail Cronauer.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
Festival of Independent Theaters - Evening 2
Bath House Cultural Center

Second Thought Theater's production of Summer Evening in Des Moines by Charles Mee is a series of vignettes depicting wo/man's search for meaning. Underscored with great music, the play asks the universal question: How do people connect? Vignettes take the audience on a tour of forms of escape people use to make their lives meaningful. Edgar (Tom Parr IV) the puppeter, manipulates his puppets, Charlie (Erik Archilla) and Mortimer (Joel McDonald), his alter egos, with some very funny shtick.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
Fever
Hennepin Center For The Arts

 Connie Evingson, an adept singer with a cool jazz style, is a popular Twin Cities performer. She premiered and developed her Peggy Lee homage at Illusion's Fresh Ink workshop series and then brought the show in for a regular commercial run. Evingson does not impersonate Lee, although her blonde looks and Scandinavian background would qualify her for that approach. Instead, she sings in her own style many of the songs identified with Lee and, in between numbers, narrates snippets of biographical material.

Michael Sander
Date Reviewed:
March 1999
Fever, The
Tsunami Bakery & Café (and other venues)

 This provocative, trenchant, one-person play by Wallace Shawn (who conceived it to be performed in homes and apartments, for groups of ten or twelve -- and who performed it himself in New York for many months), is set in a cheap hotel room in an unnamed country where the hero (Paul Mackley), a functionary for a human-rights organization, lies suffering from a malaria-like illness which gives him the fever of the title and triggers a stream-of disjointed-consciousness monologue.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 1999
Few Good Men, A
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 Probably because military demeanor is in the forefront of today's news, A Few Good Men is likely to attract even audiences who have already seen the movie. Set and sound go far in making Asolo Rep's presentation a different experience. Sharp, curt military drumbeats between scenes urge us to snap to attention. The American flag filling the backdrop casts a reflection that seems to go beyond the proscenium. Action taking place on four horizontally staggered levels and forestage also makes the whole house appear an extension of stage.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2007
Few Good Men, A
Theater At The Center

 It's a big step from the musical comedies that are Theater At The Center's usual fare to a gripping, tightly-written courtroom drama -- especially one set in so hyper-masculine an environment: A Few Good Men takes place at a court-martial hearing in response to a marine's death on the likewise tension-riddled site of Guantanamo Naval Base.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Fiction
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

 Perhaps a subtitle for Fiction should be "Or Fact?" Like playwright Steven Dietz, characters Linda and Michael Waterman are authors who keep us wondering what's true. Having met in a Paris cafe where their stimulating conversation (at least as remembered by Michael) led to a marriage of 20 years, both have successful careers. After early "dry" attempts at creating literature and a month at Drake Writers Colony, he became a best-selling novelist with annual movie adaptations.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2006
Fiddler On The Roof
Derby Dinner Playhouse

 Could I sit through yet another performance of the oft-seen Fiddler on the Roof, I wondered? Indeed I could at the sterling presentation by Derby Dinner Playhouse that won my admiration from the outset and held my undivided attention throughout. One of the great works of the American musical theater, Fiddlerwon the Tony Award for best musical of 1964. Tonys also went to nearly all the major theater names who brought it to life, including Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, composer and lyricist; Joseph Stein, librettist; and Jerome Robbins, director and choreographer.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
October 1999
Fifth of July
Diversionary Theater

 Playwright Lanford Wilson delightfully manipulates the American variant of English, turning drama into comedy and comedy into drama. He writes, "Somewhere there is a portrait of him that is going through hell," when describing a man who refuses to age in the last fifteen years. The Fifth of July brings 60s Berkeley radicals together on July 4th, 1977. They have changed from the days of free love, protest marches, and getting and staying high. The current events take place at the Talley summer place in Lebanon, Missouri.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2002
Filumena
Florida Studio Theater

 Torrid lighting! A thin gushing of water from the mouth of a lion's head fountain. A soprano's thick operatic intro, soon to be matched by the ravings of Domenico Soriano, master of the Neopolitan house. Or is he?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2002
Filumena
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 Of three Filumena translations I've seen, Timberlake Wertenbaker's gets quickest to the heart of the matter and stays there. It's a struggle between ex-prostitute Filumena Marturano and her arrogant, straying lover Domenico Soriano for the acknowledgment of their relationship. It's a Big Fat Italian Family thing. For a family, there needs be husband, wife, children -- all with one name and preferably under one roof (that is, entitled to the property).

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Finding Mother
Theatrx

 What if an adoptee, in search of her birth-mother, finds a complete family of eccentrics? Even an embarrassment? Even more? Playwright Stephen Storc asked himself that question and answered it with Finding Mother. Start with Mr. and Mrs. Average American, Jacky and Richard Chandler (Courtney McMillon and Nick Kennedy) and their two average kids, a teenage daughter (Liz Lansing) and preteen son (Steffen Calac). Add Jacky's desire to find her mother.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2001
Finer Noble Gases
Actors Theater of Louisville

 Adam Rapp's Finer Noble Gases is a devastating portrayal of privileged young males who slide into the drug culture and lose all ambition and sense of reality while pursuing rock- band fame in New York's East Village. That may sound like a hackneyed film plot cobbled by Hollywood recyclers or a Rent ripoff minus music. But Rapp has transcended the genre with his cold-eyed scrutiny of pathetic slackers and his disgust at their wasted lives.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Finer Noble Gases
Avenue Playhouse

 Since heading off to Kentucky for an apprenticeship with the famed Actors Theater of Louisville, Robert Simmons has peeped back on the Charlotte scene a couple of times. Now after a powerful lead last month in Victory Pictures' Kiss of the Spider Woman, he's back as production manager of Finer Noble Gases. Better still, he's rejoined his dad, Michael, as VP of development at Vic Pix. The significance of that comes clear from the moment you enter the Central Avenue Playhouse.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
September 2003
Finger Painting in a Murphy Bed
OnStage Playhouse

 You get off the subway in Astoria, Queens, and you enter a world of middle-class, well-kept row-houses as well as lower-middle-class, multi-story walk-ups. There are many tales behind those doors. Playwright David L. Patterson weaves a delightfully humorous yet warm and, occasionally, passionate story with Finger Painting in a Murphy Bed.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Finishing the Picture
Goodman Theater

 Once upon a time, there was a beautiful doll who wanted to be a real girl. Or maybe the foundation of this newest play by Arthur Miller is the myth of the sleeping princess. Whatever its metaphors, the Doll is a film goddess reduced to infantile incoherence -- running naked through the halls, squalling when confronted by scary grownups, crying for her nurturing acting-coach - in the middle of a location shoot, surrounded by a flock of worshippers all looking out for their own interests as they struggle to revive her.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2004
Finishing the Picture
Goodman Theater

 Dealt with in 1964's After the Fall, Marilyn Monroe reappears, center of attention, in Arthur Miller's roman a clef, Finishing The Picture. Now 89, Miller returns with Monroe, here as a brunette and called Kitty, in a nervous-breakdown, halting production of the 1961 John Huston western, "The Misfits," which Miller wrote and turned out to be Monroe's and her co-star, Clark Gable's, last picture. Lampooning acting gurus Lee and Paula Strasberg, known here as Jerome and Flora Fassinger, Miller settles old scores.

Kevin Henely
Date Reviewed:
October 2004
Fiorello
Theater Works

 All of New York City circa 1915-33 is on Theatre Works' intimate stage, but it doesn't seem crowded - except with talent. Fiorello! capsulizes the career of Manhattan Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The lively musical shows him "On the Side of the Angels" from his days as a lawyer for "the little people."

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Fire on the Mountain
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

 Taken from field interviews with Appalachian coal miners and their families, Fire on the Mountain offers stories of their lives and their relationships with each other. Punctuated by authentic music of the area, played on familiar instruments but just as often rendered a capella or to feet stomping rhythmically, themes emerge: Both lands and laborers have been exploited, yet the people love their land and each other. Vivid slides on both sides of a bright blue backdrop picture miners' sooty faces or legs deep in mud or bodies tensed as arms swing axes.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2006
Firebugs, The
Viaduct

In studies of post-WWII European dramatists, scholars tend to prefer the more accessible satires of Friedrich Durrenmatt to those of Max Frisch -- or could it be that the protagonist of The Firebugs is a humble citizen, disturbingly similar to ourselves? Certainly, Gottlieb Biedermann (whose name translates "God-Love Everyman") is not a monster: his transgressions are petty, his intentions benevolent, his concerns private -- all adding up to a vision so myopic as to make him a perfect pigeon for the arsonists to whom he extends his hospitality.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
No Sex Please, We're British
PowPAC

We've all done it!

That is, we've all purchased something through the mails. More than once we've gotten the wrong item. Few of us, though, purchased stemware and receive pornography. Alas, Francis and Peter Hunter (Carolyn E. Wheat and Frank Remiatte) did just that in Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot's hilarious farce, No Sex Please, We're British, the current offering at PowPAC.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2008

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