Frogs, The
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

 The Frogs, now at Lincoln Center, billed as "A New Musical," is only about 2400 years old. Based on the play by Aristophanes, adapted by Burt Shevelove, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and re-adapted by Nathan Lane, the show is the broadest of farces, dripping with imagination, sparkle and laughs. It's not a great work, but Susan Stroman has directed and choreographed this mixture of Greek myth, contemporary political commentary, and absurdity with brilliance, imagination and flair.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Frost/Nixon
Bernard B. Jacobs

 I was so enthralled by the play Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan, now on Broadway, and by the performances of Frank Langella and Michael Sheen, that I could barely take notes.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2007
Full Monty, The
Eugene O'Neill Theater

 Better shows may be playing around New York right now, but I can't think of one I have more unfettered affection for than The Full Monty, the just-opened musical that manages to improve upon the charming 1997 British film on which it's based. The show is rough around the edges, and there's scant evidence of its reported $7 million budget (sets are effective, but chintzy), but every minute the show wants nothing more than to entertain you and give you a rollicking good time.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Full Monty, The
Eugene O'Neill Theater

 If you've seen the 1997 British film of The Full Monty, there's really no need to spend the time and money to see this live version. Essentially, the stories are identical: a group of out-of-work factory employees need to come up with some quick cash. The most desperate of these blue-collar boyos is Jerry Lukowski, who is several payments behind in his child support and therefore could lose custody of his son to his ex-wife. Incredibly, the guys decide to become strippers, a la Chippendale's. Auditions are held, and the "best" candidates are selected from this pitiful group.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
E Meno Male Che C'E' Maria
Teatro Sistina

 This musical adaptation of "Mrs. Doubtfire" provides an entertaining evening. The title, roughly, means, "Well, at least there's always Maria" -- the re-named protagonist. The plot concerns a man whose wife leaves him, winning full custody of their three children. The lonely husband impersonates a female nanny and gets the job of caring for his own kids while their mom works all day outside the home. It is, to mix the national source of my figure of speech, a tour de force for Enrico Montesano, who is a star of Italian films and night clubs.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
December 2000
Eastward Ho!
Royal Shakespeare Company - Gielgud Theatre

 A parade of merchant-class Jacobean Londonites, baskets of fruits and veggies on heads, begins this "city play" that settles down in Goldsmiths Row, where Touchstone has two apprentices: honest, hard-working Golding (proper but achromic James Tucker) and ambitious carouser Quicksilver (aptly silly Billy Carter). Likewise, the Touchstone daughters differ. Modest Mildred (lovely brunette Shelly Conn) is of fine character, a good match for her father to give Golding, whom he then releases from servitude.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
Easy Virtue
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater Stage

 As we have come to expect from The Shaw, this Canadian professional premiere of a Coward play demonstrates the definitive treatment of Britain's master of sharp repartee and elegant observer of high society. And what a society it was in 1925 when Coward, age 25, wrote Easy Virtue. The year before, Hay Fever made him a celebrity, and Easy Virtue was a natural follow-up. Like his contemporaries, Shaw and Granville-Barker, Coward tackled marital affairs and male-female relations. Unlike them however, he is not verbose.

Alan Raeburn
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Eighty-Four Charing Cross Road
Atelier de la Main d'Or

 Here's one for the books and in more ways than one: A play, production, and actors so good that one wishes it were longer. A struggling young writer working from her small apartment in New York, Helene Hanff hungers for classic literature of the ages but particularly Britain. She loves books others have loved or, at least, used. So in 1949 she gets in touch with Marks & Co., second-hand booksellers at 84 Charing Cross Road, London -- mailing a request and some dollar bills.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Embers
Duke of York's Theatre

 If you go to Embers, it should be to see Jeremy Irons' sustained, quite realistic performance of what is essentially a dramatic monologue. As Heinrik, a retired general from the Austro-Hungarian army, he "entertains" (with gun nearby) Konrad, who'd been his bosom friend since childhood. Now in his castle-like home, in the midst of the ravages of WW II, Heinrik dwells on the last time they were together, hunting. Konrad then fled Vienna, never contacting Heinrik or his wife Christina. Nor did she speak to her husband from then until her death eight years later.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2006
Enrico IV
Arena del Sole

 Noted Italian Shakespearean actor Glauco Mauri is the centerpiece of this beautifully realized production of Luigi Pirandello's cryptic look at madness premiered in 1922. The story concerns a man who suffers complete amnesia following a fall from a horse during a faux medieval tournament. He is condemned to live in an eternal present: for him, the year 1071. Those around him attempt to maintain his illusion of living in medieval times, even as his wife Matilde (Magda Mercatali) discerns glimmers of his lucidity.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
January 1999
Herod's Ring
Galleria Toledo

 (see Criticopia International listing(s) under "L'Anello di Erode")

Eurydice
Whitehall Theatre

 Jean Anouilh drew on ancient literature several times in his career, most notably in his wonderful Antigone of 1942. He had also conveyed his disillusion the year before with Eurydice, in which he updated the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Set in a French provincial railway-station snack bar in the 1930s, the play introduces us to itinerant fiddler Orpheus (Orlando Seale) and his over-the-hill, boozy dad (Edward de Souza). Members of a third-rate acting troupe arrive, including Eurydice (Amy Marston).

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Fallout
Royal Court - Jerwood Theatre Downstairs

 Black theater in Britain has received a big boost with the production of Fallout by Roy Williams. The writer, now 35, has several awards to his credit for previous plays. The new work is a stunner, both in the writing and the acting.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 2003
Feast Of Snails, The
Lyric Theatre

 Though it's a dreary, rainy Icelandic night, in the great room of Karl Johnson's ancestral mansion, the high, white, modern art-laden walls reflect abundant artificial light. More comes from the fireplace flanked by antique spears. Candles on the long down-front dining table reflect the silver and gleaming wine glasses, set up for just one.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Festen
Lyric Theatre

 Once again, a classic film gets transferred to the stage. Accordingly, everything on it, in it is black and white. Yet the aura of a posh resort, where a 60th birthday party will be held for Helga, is colored by mystery. Why wasn't son Michael invited? Could it be because of his tough mouth, his violent yet sexy relationship with wife Meta, his egotistic bullying? Doesn't sister Helene appear to be still spooked by the death of their other sister? Don't the others hear a child singing, crying? Mostly, why should successful (and invited) son Christian act so remote?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2004
Fight Among Angels
Parco dei Pini

 (See Criticopia International review(s) under "Lotta degli angeli")
http://www.totaltheater.com/?q=node/2762

Floyd Collins
Bridewell Theatre

This musical surfaced off-Broadway in 1996, winning a Lucille Lortel Award, and is now having its British premiere at the small enterprising Bridewell Theatre. The work deals with a piece of real history: spelunker Floyd Collins (Nigel Richards) in the winter of 1925 is exploring Sand Cave in Kentucky when a falling boulder pins his leg 150 feet below ground. Some 30,000 people flood the site and the press turns the situation into a nationwide story while futile attempts are made over two weeks to free the victim.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Foggy Day, A
Shaw Festival

 This appealing souffle exotically combines British high society with American showbiz. The Gershwins musicalized this lively romance using its original title as a movie vehicle for Fred Astaire, then a rising star at RKO. George's sudden death from a brain tumor at 38 saw the project finished by other writers. Festival artistic director Christopher Newton rescued "A Damsel In Distress" from obscurity and had it reworked into A Foggy Day. It became the 1998 Festival's sellout.

Alan Raeburn
Date Reviewed:
May 1999
Fragments de theatre
Theatre Le Proscenium

 The tiny black box of Theatre Le Proscenium admirably suits the claustrophobic atmosphere of two theater pieces, both two handers, so typically Beckett. Life is painful for the blind man and the cripple in Fragment I. Unrelated to the world around them, they have only each other...or do they? In a world where the human voice is no longer listened to, they heed each other. One tries to make music, but the violin he scratches on is fake. The other purrs; he farts, therefore he is. Billy uses a stick to guide the unseeing companion.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Frattellini
Galleria Toledo

 With Frattellini, Galleria Toledo presented a powerful AIDS drama, one based on traditional Catholic imagery that cut through hypocrisy surrounding the conditions victims of the disease must endure. Gildo (Francesco Silvestri) tells his mother every day that he is going to mass but instead goes to care for his brother (Walter Del Gaiso) in an antiquated, run-down hospital room.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
April 1997
Frou-Frou les Bains
Theatre Daunou

 It's season-opening time in the supposedly chic thermal spa where complications become more plentiful than mineral water. From a balcony, four musicians seem to bounce melodies off the colorful mosaic-tiled walls, while staff dance with mops and buckets and the Site Master (Urbain Cancelier, properly self-important) screams orders. Bellman Batistin (author Patrick Haudecoeur, acting like Chaplin but looking like the old Phillip Morris page) must double as a repairman.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2003
Golda's Balcony
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

 A magnificent performance about a magnificent person distinguishes a vehicle that, despite author William Gibson's attempts at an innovative structure, falls somewhat short as a play. Indeed, what is basically a narrative goes all over the map, both literally and figuratively. The "action" is likely to confuse anyone unaware of the history involved, perhaps also people who are.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2006
Golden Boy
Lamplighters Community Theater

Playwright Clifford Odets championed the underprivileged. He even joined the Communist party for eight months in 1935, eventually to be investigated by Joseph McCarthy. Golden Boy, currently at Lamplighters under the direction of E. Duane Weekly, was his most famous play. It led to a screenwriting career in Hollywood, which didn't hinder him writing for the stage. He went on to become an artist and an art collector.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
October 2005
Golden Boy
Long Wharf Theater

 Golden Boy began life as a drama, written by Clifford Odets for the Group Theater in the 1930s. It espoused a sense of gritty realism, which matched the philosophy of this new dynamic group. Made into a film with William Holden (making his debut) and Barbara Stanwyck in 1939, Golden Boy was rewritten as a musical in the 1960s, with a book by Odets, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Lee Adams, as a specific vehicle for Sammy Davis, Jr., who was already a star. Just before the first rehearsal, Odets died. After a delay, William Gibson helped to rewrite the book.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Golden Boy
Raven Theater

 I'd even settle for a lightweight! puffs exasperated manager Tom Moody, and in this classic American tale of an innocent violin-player chewed up in the brutal and corrupt world of pro boxing circa 1930s, that's what he gets. Jeremy Glickstein is a pale, skinny, almost boneless ferret of an actor, more often seen playing pasty-faced psychopaths, and the moment we see him, we know that Joe Bonaparte, the kid hungry for escape from poverty and squalor, hasn't a chance.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
May 2003
Golden Child
David Henry Hwang Theater

 David Henry Hwang's latest play, produced in an Asian-American theater named after him, measures the price that change exacts on family. Set largely in a village near Samoy, in southeast China, in 1918, Golden Child is an autobiographical work dealing with Eng Tien-Bin, a man patterned after Hwang's grandfather.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2000
Gone Missing
Actors Theater of Louisville

 Theatergoers who venture to Actors Theater of Louisville to catch the incredibly gifted, serio-comic New York troupe called The Civilians during its limited run are not likely soon to forget this dazzling experience. In Gone Missing, written and directed by Steven Cosson from interviews conducted by the company, the wide-ranging theme of loss -- innocence, jewelry, pets, cell phones, shoes, toys, husbands, eyeglasses, self-worth, life itself -- is treated with humor, poignancy, anger, and resignation in witty indelible sketches and song.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
September 2006
Good Body, The
Majestic Theater

Eve Ensler brought her one-woman show, The Good Body, to Dallas. Dallas did not reciprocate.

What is clearly lacking is a modicum of market research. Ensler's audience, from all indications, dwells on the university campus populated mostly by idealistic young people coming to terms with their identities. For those of us who have found it, for better or worse, The Good Body has minimal appeal. At a Saturday matinee at the elegant Majestic Theatre in downtown Dallas on a brisk, sunny afternoon, the house appeared to be only 25 percent occupied.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
December 2005
Good Doctor, The
Pasadena Playhouse

 Light summer fare is the best way to sum up this mixed bag of short comic playlets set in Chekhov's time but given an American gloss by Simon, who even contributes a sketch of his own which has nothing to do with Chekhov ("The Arrangement," about a father introducing his virginal young son to a prostitute). Simon frames the evening by introducing a Chekhov-like character called The Writer (the estimable Harry Groener) whose narration links the action. The Writer, when not confessing his problems with writer's block, steps into some of the stories and assumes other personae.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Good Doctor, The
North Park Vaudeville

 The 40-seat theater was packed on opening night for Neil Simon's homage to Anton Chekhov, The Good Doctor. Based on short stories by Chekhov, Neil Simon created a delightful collection of nine vignettes narrated by The Writer. Director Tisha Tumangan brings together an outstanding cast led by Anthony Hamm, who bridges each scene as the Narrator/Writer and Anton and Anton's father in the final selection.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Good Evening
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

 Red velvet curtains, footlights, off to one side a piano topped with a vase of scarlet roses - all set up a typical British music hall. But what follows is not typical. It's a series of hilarious sketches that are thirty years old yet mostly amazingly fresh. Though I've seen them before (at FST, in fact) and heard them often (in the full glory of their literacy) on their authors' recording, I still just laughed throughout a "Good Evening" indeed.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
Good Person Of Szechuan, The
Oregon Shakespeare Festival

 Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechuan invites and receives an "un-Brechtian" produc tion at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, yet the playwright's ironic comments on human exploitation of one class by another come through clearly. Here, Brecht mixes his commentary with melodrama. The Oregon production puts broad comedy, even slapstick, into the mix.

Al Reiss
Date Reviewed:
February 1999
Good Thing
Taper, Too at the Actors' Gang

 Jessica Goldberg's portrait of the human condition in the USA is not a pretty one. In her short, taut, staccato-like drama, Good Thing, everybody is screwed-up and in pain. The two middle-aged folk, John and Nancy Roy (Francis Guinan and Shannon Holt, respectively), are school guidance counselors who can help everyone but themselves. Childless, damaged by an affair he had, they are on the verge of splitting up.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2001
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
Park Square Theater

 Linda Kelsey, familiar from "The Lou Grant Show" and other television appearances, proves to be an engaging stage presence in playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald's comic, feminist take on a couple of classic heroines. As cloistered academic Constance Ledbelly (an unnecessarily oafish name), she travels back in time to find out the truth about the women who played opposite Othello and Romeo, and discovers some truths about herself as well.

Michael Sander
Date Reviewed:
May 1999
Gore More Years
Odyssey Theater Ensemble

 Washington DC-based comedy troupe Gross National Product has gone bi-coastal in order to ride the wave of public attention whipped up by the DNC. Politics and politicians are fair game for GNP's satirists, with not only Gore and Bush being ribbed, but Hillary and Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Jane Seymour, Charlton Heston, Ariana Huffington and William Buckley as well. Utilizing a sketch format sprinkled with songs and improv, Gore More Years or Son Of A Bush is more likable than memorable, with the humor rarely drawing blood.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Got Apathy?
Brave New Workshop Theater

 The Brave New Workshop, whose satirical revues are grounded in an improvisational process that evolves into scripted shows, has long specialized in political satire. Interestingly, perhaps because our current crop of politicians provides their own self-satirizing blunders, recent Workshop shows have been short on big comic payoffs. Got Apathy? skips the politics for a change, but mines a much more consistent vein of humor. The focus is as simple as the way we live today, with little emotional investment and willingness to go with the flow of whatever compels us at the moment.

Michael Sander
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Graceland
Central Avenue Playhouse

 Ever since the palace of The King opened to the public in June 1982, the Memphis mansion of Elvis Presley has been the epicenter for the most outrageous celebrity worship that our outrageous nation can produce. So it's no wonder an American playwright would seek to probe the depth of the mania of two women vying for the honor of being the first to set foot on newly hallowed ground. What is somewhat surprising in Ellen Byron's Graceland, then, is the decorous modesty of the playwright's characterizations.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
July 2003
Graduate, The
Civic Theater

 The Graduate was a wonderful film in its time, but it fails as a play, even though the touring cast is generally well chosen. Jerry Hall, as Mrs. Robinson, is all right, with some good moments. She certainly is quite attractive, and, in shadows, accomplishes her nude scene. Devon Sorvari, as Elaine Robinson, ends up being totally "valley girl." The rest of the cast is there, but not too convincingly. Rider Strong never grasps the depths of Benjamin or understand his motivations. Dennis Parlato as Mr. Robinson has one excellent scene.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2003
Graduate, The
OnStage Playhouse

 About seven years ago, under the adapting pen of Terry Johnson, The Graduate, the Sixties hit film, entered the stage. Currently Chula Vista's OnStage offering, the production has many high points. The script has both high points and blunders.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2007
La Gran Scena Opera
Athenaeum Theater

 Under the artistic direction of Ira Siff (who plays diva Mme. Vera Galupe-Borszkh with hilarious aplomb), La Gran Scena Opera Co. really lovingly and cleverly spoofs the foibles and absurdities of opera. The divas in drag have real talent, and the scenes from well-known operas that they choose to excerpt are authentically parodied -- so it makes for a successful match. The ludicrously long death scenes are even more drawn out, the catty rivalry between divas is even more exaggerated, and the costumes and hairdos -- and appropriate accompanying behavior -- are even more flamboyant.

Effie Mihopoulos
Date Reviewed:
February 2000

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