Frank's Home
Goodman Theater

 I need to strip down to essentials, Frank Lloyd Wright declares as he watches the schoolhouse near his Hollyhock House being finished. Back from Tokyo with his Imperial House threatened by storms and without further work, he's in Hollywood's Olive Hill, contemplating a life change. He'll re-establish family connections with daughter Catherine and son Lloyd, while divorcing their mother and ridding himself (though she doesn't yet know it) of his alcohol and drug- addicted mistress Miriam.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2006
Free And Clear
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

 Old-fashioned in the best sense, Free and Clear typifies the major theme of realistic American drama in the middle of the 20th century. It centers on family relationships. Those between father and sons dominate here, followed closely by mothers with sons. Inter-generational problems stem from the relations between the parents, particularly due to their differing backgrounds and their aspirations for themselves and their boys.
Sounds abstract? Not as embodied by the 1940 Westchester, New York family recreated by Robert Anderson.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
May 2004
Fridays With Maureen
Actor's Asylum

 Pam Benjamin and Beacon Theater should be commended for bringing a new work to the San Diego Theater scene. Very few theaters are willing to take the risk. That said, the playwright should have done a vast number of rewrites and have the play presented in a couple of reader's theaters. Even with extensive pre-production work, the stage action usually calls for additional rewriting.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
Friends And Enemies
Bitter Truth Playhouse

 David Silverstein (Andrew Harrison Leeds) is a Jewish kid from Cleveland. Mahmoud Rasmi (Amir Salehi) is a Palestinian kid from Jordan. Both become roommates at George Washington University in Washington DC, as part of an international summer study course. They are each thirteen when the play opens and reach the age of eighteen by play's end. It's almost a too-neat conflict that Heidi Joyce sets up, with the kids standing for symbols of the inability of Arabs and Jews to get along.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
Fritz Blitz 2004 - Week 1
Lyceum Space

 Fritz Blitz 2004, featuring California playwrights, is the August festival at the Lyceum Space in Horton Plaza, beginning just four days after the close of the Actors Alliance Fest's two-week run. Week One includes four short plays, Week Two one full-length play, Week Three has a duet of plays, and Week Four ends the Blitz with four short plays.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Fritz Blitz 2004 - Week 3
Lyceum Space

 One of the best parts of a short play or film festival, such as Fritz Blitz and Actors Alliance Fest, which usually features short plays, is if you don't like one offering, there will be another in a few minutes that you may love. Week three of Fritz Blitz has two short plays. Last week was a single play and both opening and closing weeks have four plays each.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Fritz Blitz 2004 - Week 4
Lyceum Space

 Messed-up marriages, death and near death and executions comprise the themes for Fritz Blitz's fourth week. Funny, sexy, poignant, startling, satirical and compassionate are just a few of moods you will see. This is a good week to go to the Blitz.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Fritz Blitz 2006 - Week 1
Lyceum Space

 The 14th Annual Fritz Blitz is in town Thursday to Sunday, thru September 17th, 2006. This week there is a single play. Next week three, the third week four, and the final week plays by the successful Los Angeles playwright Mary Steelsmith. Steelsmith's full-length, Isaac, I Am just won the prestigious Helford Prize. We are looking forward to her short plays.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
Musical of Musicals, The
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

With its emphasis on presenting Broadway musicals on the Suncoast, Golden Apple is just the right home for The Musical of Musicals (The Musical). Spoofing the scores, scripts, and styles of musical greats makes a little plot go a long way. Five long ways, to be exact, via as many short plays.

Using the theme of Rent, the story finds a heroine who can't pay hers to her landlord villain unless she weds or beds him. Or she may be out of danger if, mostly owing to advice from a sage older woman, heroine gets together with a hero who'll pay the rent for her.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Shivaree
OnStage Playhouse

A very frustrated Chandler Kimbrough (Brandon Alexander) lives a solitary life as a hemophiliac in William Mastrosimone's charming Shivaree. OnStage Playhouse has once again brought their audiences a play not seen in the San Diego area. This production opens their challenging 2008-2009 season.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
After the Dance
Shaw Festival - Royal George Theater

Occasionally there's a renewed effort to move Terrence Rattigan up to the level of his contemporary pre-"Angry Young Men" playwrights like Noel Coward and the poetic Christopher Fry, if only because his very literate, traditional plays were enormously popular, leading to his knighthood. But only a few still seem to work: The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, Separate Tables, and maybe The Deep Blue Sea.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
All's Well That Ends Well
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

I have to confess that although it has many virtues – most notably poetic effusions and almost constant verbal wit – I've never liked Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. The heroine, Helena, is an unlikely combination of Patient Griselda, Florence Nightingale, and Cinderella, who chases after a younger, more noble, better looking, young lord, cures an incurable king, is awarded the hand of any male she desires, manipulates the young man into a marriage that he then flees from, and goes through even more unbelievable maneuvers to bed him and get pregnant by him and actually win

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Of Equal Measure
Kirk Douglas Theater

Set in the White House circa 1914-1917, Of Equal Measure has two protagonists (a dramaturgical flaw which ultimately causes grievous problems for the playwright): President Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence Pressman) and Jade Kingston (Michole Briana White). Kingston is a woman of color -- the only one of her kind in the White House -- who works as a stenographer to one of Wilson's advisors, Robert Lansing (Dennis Cockrum), and is thus privy to the life-and-death political battles taking place in the Oval Office.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
True West
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Like the play itself, the title of "True West" has layers of meaning. True West refers to a mythic place where might be sought the American Dream of a new, successful life. A place, too, where rugged individualism could be parlayed into an idealistic future. A reference to many a movie that has pictured the "True West" as site of elemental struggles to subdue nature and human nature, where good guys struggle against bad leading to a fortuitous showdown. "True West" has the power to create archetypes to inspire artists.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
tick, tick...BOOM!
10th Avenue Theater

Energy, Energy, Energy! That describes Stone Soup's production of tick, tick.BOOM! Just what does the enterprising artist do when he is about to turn thirty, and he doesn't have a grand success yet? The question could easily be: how many artists get a major success before age thirty? That doesn't matter, for when you are in your twenties, you want everything and expect you can get it. That's exactly what Jonathan Larson expected when he wrote Superbia. Alas, it didn't happen.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2008
Streetcar Named Desire, A
Ion Theater

 It's hot. It's humid. It's New Orleans in the summer. In 1940, in the Kowalski's apartment there is no air conditioning. Blanche DuBois has come to visit her sister, Stella Kowalski, and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, whom she has never met. It is an understatement to say these three are flawed, a gross understatement.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Fritz Blitz 2006 - Week 2
Lyceum Space

 Here we are in Week Two of the four-week Fritz Blitz. This week we have three plays, two from San Diego and one from a San Francisco playwright. These productions are running through September 3rd, 2006. One of the joys of short plays is that they have to be written tightly. No lingering about. The payoff and the precursors have to be quick.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
Fritz Blitz 2006 - Week 3
Lyceum Space

There are two weeks left on the annual cycle of new plays being held at the Lyceum Space, Thursdays through Sundays. The third week of the Fritz Blitz runs through September 10th, 2006.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2006
Fritz Blitz 2007 - Week 3
Lyceum Space

 Mr. Very Straight, Sammy (Duane Daniels) is talking with his long–time friend, Dean (John Garcia), who is not. They are having a serious conversation when the waiter (Jamie Effros) makes a couple of attempts to get an order. The two finally order some wine and continue their completely guy-type discussion. Challenges are tossed about, and finally the gauntlet is laid down and a bet is placed.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2007
Fritz Blitz 2007 - Week 4
Lyceum Space

 Nine actors, 48 characters, one cross–dresser, seven segments (I think), one deranged playwright, and one brave director. These are the elements necessary to produce an extremely amusing, totally wacky experience titled, A Fish without His Flippers. Dane Stauffer did what any good director would do with Bill Robens insanely funny script: he simply brought together a fabulous cast.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2007
From Bed To Worse
Patio Playhouse

 Patio Playhouse premieres local playwright Peggy Dougherty's From Bed To Worse under Jim Clevenger's direction. Set in contemporary New York, the play places a psychologist, two of her patients, and her husband in a series of vignettes. Mary Canon (Sharon Lawson) is treating a patient, Cynthia Wells (Karen Spafford), who is having an affair with a married man. There is a great deal of similarity between her lover and Mary's husband, Dentist Richard Breyer (George Blum).

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
From My Hometown
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

 It has been almost three years since the musical revue From My Hometown left Milwaukee for its hometown, New York. Time has seasoned this show in several important ways, and Hometown now makes a welcome reappearance. Although some minor tinkering with the script is evident, the story remains the same: a talented trio of R & B singers arrive in New York.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2000
Front Page, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 What a drag as reporters wait around the 1920s Chicago City Hall news room for an anarchist and (accidental) cop killer to be hanged. The corrupt sheriff and mayor both want his quick demise (as a Red, which he's not) to assure their ascendance in an impending election. Hildy Johnson won't be there as the ace reporter, though. After a final drink and farewell to the guys, off he'll train to NYC and a lucrative advertising job. Fiance Peggy and her mother are waiting to go with him. He's already late - and he's going to be much later.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2005
Front Page, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

 The Milwaukee Repertory Theater opened its 2001-2002 season with a solid production of the chestnut The Front Page, offering a look back at life in the 1920s. The play is set in the press room of a Chicago criminal courts building. It's late at night, and a cluster of "newspapermen" (women reporters were rare or nonexistent) await a hanging scheduled for the following morning. There's virtually no action in the sleepy first act, so characters have plenty of time to loaf, play cards and muse about life.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2001
Yank
Diversionary Theater

Today, the military's policy is "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." 65 years ago, at the height of WWII, the official policy was a Dishonorable Discharge and the vindictiveness of some homophobes. Diversionary Theater is presenting the West Coast premiere of David and Joseph Zellnik's Yank, the story of gays in the army in WWII.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Finian's Rainbow (OCR Review)

 It's sad, confounding, and kind of scary that the recent Broadway revival of the evergreen Burton Lane/E.Y. Harburg musical, Finian's Rainbow, had such a brief run despite receiving almost universal acclaim from the critics. But the pot of gold at the end of this evanescent rainbow is the recently released cast recording from P.S. Classics.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
March 2010
Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswoman's Guild Dramatic Society's Production Of Macbeth, The
Patio Playhouse Community Theater

This is by far the very worst Macbeth ever performed. It doesn't help that The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society produced this fiasco. This group of women even brought in theater expert George Peach (Jim Clevenger) to give his expert opinion. Not only that, they made him perform in drag. Good grief! Being a woman's club, they're short of men, so they cast goateed Henry (Steve Stetak) in a prominent female role.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Mrs. Warren's Profession
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater

One of G. B. Shaw's earliest and most controversial plays, Mrs. Warren's Profession is also one of his "talk-plays" wherein the action-less long speeches crackle with argument and confrontation so inherently dramatic that they are spellbinding. The final scene indulges in some excessive preaching, but – if played as well as the Shaw Festival's four successive productions have been – this more than a century-old play still seems timely, engrossing and surprising.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Little Night Music, A
Shaw Festival - Court House Theater

The Shaw Festival has a tradition of offering cut-down musicals staged very handsomely but with the orchestra and cast adapted to a smaller scale in the Royal George Theater. Their musicals performed on the open, smaller stage of the intimate Court House Theater have been modest, more experimental works, a description that does not fit Sondheim's A Little Night Music.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Mystery of Irma Vep, The
Florida Studio Theater

The right way to do Theater of the Ridiculous is to play it straight. Proper directing means forbidding the actors to mug or thrust self-designed vaudeville or revue "bits" into the activity. Happily, the required two-of-the-same-sex players under Jim Helsinger's direction get everything as Charles Ludlam specified. Having recently seen the play at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., I was worried FST would duplicate a production that, while spirited and lavish, kept laughing at itself more than the audience did.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Southern Comforts
Florida Studio Theater

If ever a play and players sought a perfect venue and audience, all could not find a better fit than at summer's end at FST. Since late life romances aren't new to Sarasota playgoers, a fictional version must be authentic. Southern Comforts aces that requirement.

Amanda Cross, helping out her daughter who has married and moved to New Jersey from their native Tennessee, delivers church donation envelopes to Gus Klingman. They may as well have contained letters of intent, for she's quickly flirting and soon watching a televised ballgame with him.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2008
Paradise
Compass Theater

My first thought upon leaving Compass Theater tonight was that Glyn O'Malley's Paradise should be immediately followed by a talk-back session. It would have been stimulating to hear from people who lived through the Intifada in Israel in 2002.

The story is based on a Palestinian, Ayat al-Akhrase, and an Israeli, Rachel Levy, two 17-year-old girls caught in the terror of the time. Director Alice Cash, herself 17, chose a most difficult task of bringing a hard-driving play to the Resilience of the Spirit Festival. The story parallels the lives of two teenagers.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Bets and Blue Notes
Lyceum Space

It was like meeting an old friend.

On stage at the Lyceum Space, Kevin Armento's Bets & Blue Notes opened the Fritz Blitz 2008, which features the best plays presented in the festival over the last 15 years. Also, it was almost the same cast under the same director and choreographer (Don Loper and Hernando Gomez) as I had seen previously. It was not a tired redo, but an exciting, dynamic production.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Lady of Larkspur Lotion, The / Hello from Bertha
Bath House Cultural Center

The 10th annual Festival of Independent Theaters (FIT) opened a four-week run at the Bath House Cultural Center on White Rock Lake on July 17. One Thirty Productions, new to FIT this year, presents two early Tennessee Williams one-acts: The Lady of Larkspur Lotion and Hello From Bertha. The former is set in the bedroom of a squalid rooming house in New Orleans' French Quarter. The boarder, Mrs. Hardwicke-Moore (Marty Van Kleek) channels Blanche duBois as she complains to her landlady, Mrs.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Ghost Sonata, The
Bath House Cultural Center

The Drama Club presents August Strindberg's 1907 surreal one-act play, The Ghost Sonata. It is one of his five Chamber Plays first produced in Stockholm from 1907-09. They are so named due to their lyrical qualities and similarities to chamber music.

The Ghost Sonata is set in 1907 North Dakota and depicts the good and evil in humanity. We learn that a student, Arkenholtz (Eric Archilla) has just saved a child from being crushed in front of a crumbling building. He represents the good in humanity and possesses psychic powers.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Coco and Gigi
Bath House Cultural Center

Echo Theater's Coco and Gigi by local playwright Isabella Russell-Ides could easily be subtitled Gogo and Didi. For thirty minutes, Gigi (Ellen Locy) and Cosmo (John Davies) sit on a park bench waiting, not for Godot, but for enlightenment. It never arrives.

This same scene is repeated on an adjacent park bench with virtually the same dialogue by two young, African-American actresses, Ashley Wilkerson as Gigi and Jeanette Scott as Cosima.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Permanent Signal, A
Bath House Cultural Center

 WingSpan Theater Company's staging of Sherry Kramer's new play, A Permanent Signal, is a U.S. premiere. It features two of Dallas' most gifted comedic actors, Beverly Jacob Daniel and Lulu Ward, and a talented, up-and-coming Jennifer Youle.

The Siren sisters, Betty (Daniel) and Noreen (Ward) planted sweetness in Mary (Youle) several millennia ago. They have returned to Earth to reap what they sowed, but it seems their "crop" has morphed into something not quite as sweet as they planted.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Sailor's Song
New Village Arts Theater

This has been the weekend to visit old friends. First was the Fritz Blitz's rerun of Bets and Blue Notes. Now, admittedly one of my favorites, John Patrick Stanley's charming blend of romance, dark comedy, music, and dance in New Village Arts' production of Sailor's Song.

Director Kristine Kurner is again at the helm with repeats Amanda Morrow, Amanda Sitton, Robin Christ, and Manny Fernandes (but in a new role) being joined by Joshua Everett Johnson on stage. Much of the same design people joined in this new production.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Receptionist, The
Cygnet Theater

What a great outer office with its very expensive paneled walls and elegant reception desk. The receptionist is busy fielding calls, routing them to voice mail, and, when not busy, talking to her errant husband and girlfriends. Everything is so normal. We soon find that all this opulence supports a branch office of only three people.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2008
Fritz Blitz 2008: Week 2
Lyceum Space Theater

Week two of Fritz Blitz 2008 opens with Tim West's Charade directed by Duane Daniels with Caitlin Finch assisting. It's a fitting play in this season leading up to the national elections. Politics in the 21st century is all about just one thing: winning. That, too, is what the play is about.

This absurdist (my thoughts) play is about two teams attempting to create the winning campaign for their candidates. While professed to be Republicans, they could be any political party, anytime.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2008

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