Movin' Out
Richard Rodgers Theater

Moving perilously close to Billy Joel-meets-The IceCapades, the all-dance musical Movin' Out wants to use Joel's tunes to tell the story of America's loss of innocence from the 1950s to the 80s. But the results, in the hands of accomplished but repetitive director/choreographer Twyla Tharp, dwell too often on dances of youthful courtship and only come to life in scenes where the Vietnam War and its psychological aftermath affect the characters.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 2002
Movin' Out
Richard Rodgers Theater

 With the emphasis on "movin", let it be understood that this is a dance production, a modern ballet, not a Broadway musical or even a dansical, and it doubles as a Billy Joel concert.

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
November 2002
Music Man, The
Neil Simon Theater

 Susan Stroman's charming revival of Meredith Willson's classic tuner begs the question: Can they make them like they used to? The answer is a resounding yes; this one's as old-fashioned as they come, but nearly irresistible. Ace choreographer-director Stroman doesn't really bother to update the material (thankfully, there's no Jesus Christ Superstar-style boneheaded ideas here) -- an admirable choice lately, as many revivals of late dilute the impact of what make them work in the first place.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
Mystery of Charles Dickens, The
Belasco Theater

 He's the college English professor you wished you had - the one who transforms the life and works of an author into a lecture as entertaining as it is educational. Grandly hammy Simon Callow narrates and plays Charles Dickens, a bunch of Dickens' most colorful characters, and Dickens playing those characters. He justifies his over-the-topness by reminding us that this is probably how Dickens played Micawber, Gamp and Heep when he embarked on the reading tours that thrilled but ultimately killed him.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Mystery of Charles Dickens, The
Belasco Theater

 In the Broadway one-man show, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, starring Simon Callow, we see a 19th-Century man portrayed in 19th-Century grand-ham performance style, when there was no amplification in theaters, and one must above all be heard, mustn't one. The show, for the most part poorly written by Peter Ackroyd, begins with rather boring exposition about Dickens' early life. As it continues, Callow, at least in this show, proves to be basically a voice actor with unused physical capability. He gives us no reality in his characters -- all are exaggerated poses, and they overlap.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2002
I Had A Dream
Istanbul State Theater

 Currently on view at the Istanbul State Theater is a charming musical with book by Nazim Hikmet and music by Cumhur Bakiskan. For the plot, it's none other than girl Fatma (Mine Tufekcioglu) in love with penurious boy, but parents try to push a moneyed candidate onto her -- with a few wrinkles. Maybe Fatma's dilemma would resolve itself in one of the customary ways, but Gypsy (Nisan Sirinyan) gets everyone high smoking opium. Everyone simultaneously jumps ship and lands on a desert isle.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
January 2002
I sette contro Tebe
Sala Assoli, Teatro Nuovo

 Continuing his long collaboration with Teatro Nuovo, Neapolitan cultural icon Mario Martone with his Teatro Uniti presented his adaptation of Seven Against Thebes. The major changes Mr. Martone made were to set the drama in a modern besieged city (presumably Bosnian Serbia, given the Orthodox shrine in one corner) and to elevate Antigone, played by favored collaborator Anna Bonaiuto, to be as important as her brother Eteocles (Marco Baliani).

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
December 1996
Il Calapranzi
Ass. Cult. Beat 72

 (Translation: "The Dumbwaiter"; see Criticopia International listing under "Victoria Station / Il Calapranzi")

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
October 1996
Victoria Station / Il Calapranzi
Galleria Toledo

 In the first of 23 scheduled theatrical offerings for the 1996-97 season at Galleria Toledo, Ass. Cult. Beat 72 [sic] presented two Pinter one-act plays. (Beckett, Fleming, Zimet and Duras are the other non-Italian authors featured this season at the most important experimental theater in Naples.)

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
October 1996
Il Censore
Teatro Colosseo

The Teatro Colosseo in Rome continued its series of new English theater with a stark production of Anthony Neilson's The Censor. The well-circulated phrase, "erotic generosity and bureaucratic cruelty," best sums up this curiously involving drama. Neilson offers few cues as to time or locale, so this could be any modern country where the public's interest in film content outweighs private liberty of expression. Power over what the public can see is concentrated in the hands of The Censor (Pietro Bontempo), a suitably repressed type.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
February 2000
Il Corano
Teatro Argentina

 The Qur'an, Islam's Holy Book, can be appreciated in many ways, among them its masterful Arabic poetry, as director/adapter Cherif shows. Three Qur'an reciters - Hala Omran, Mohamed Zitouni, El Sayed Abdallah Sadek - nicely exploited the aural appeal of the chanted text. Appropriately enough for this novice audience, they utilized a rather simple reciting style that contrasted with the more rhetorical approach by nine players.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Il Malato immaginario
Teatro Nuovo

 Noted Shakespearean actor Franco Branciaroli had the honor of opening the current theater season at Verona's Teatro Nuovo in Moliere's last play, The Imaginary Invalid (1673). Director Lamberto Puggelli created a production rigorously faithful to the original, a rarity even in Italy, where adaptations have begun to eclipse traditional stagings. (In America this kind of literalism might be found only in university theater or, more rarely, in regional venues.)

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
November 1999
Il Medico dei pazzi
Teatro Filodrammatici

 Teatro Filodrammatici director Emilio Russo has organized the entire 1999-2000 season around a single theme, The Art of Comedy, but with a strong emphasis on regional writers. Like last fall's Carta Canta, Il Medico dei pazzi offers a humorous scenario peopled with characters that could be taken from real life, here served up by Neapolitan actor/author Eduardo Scarpetta (1853-1925). Felice Sciosciammocca (played by the masterful Tonio Taiuti) has generously helped his nephew Errico Pasetta attend medical school.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
February 2000
Il Milione
Teatro Nuovo

 Using the Italian title for Marco Polo's account of his travels in the orient, the ever congenial Marco Paolini has created a Venetian notebook of character sketches of his beloved city. Except for the tragicomic attempt by the northern separatists to take over the belltower in St. Mark's Square, no aspect of the ironies of Italian politics as they concern Venice seems untouched.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
February 1999
Il mio amico Hitler
Teatro Nuovo

 Part of Teatro Nuovo's provocative Mishima series, Il mio amico Hitler was repeated after its successful run last season. Written two years before the author committed ritual suicide in 1970, the play is sensationalistic precisely because no value judgments are offered regarding any of the characters. Hitler has summoned steel magnate Krup, elite assault troops head Rohm, and confidant and resident leftist Strasser to his study in 1934, immediately before the "night of the long knives" commemorated in Visconti's film, "The Dammed."

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
May 1997
Imaginary Invalid, The
Teatro Nuovo

 (See Criticopia International review(s) under "Il Malato Immaginario")

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
November 1999
In The Balance
outdoors in Soho Square

 During the summer, a group called Alternative Arts sponsors a series of free, midday street theater performances, the locale oscillating between Soho Square and Victoria Embankment Gardens. One of the performing troupes is a duo calling itself The Better Halves, offering an entertainment titled In the Balance, which is described as "an acromantic tale of two lovers teetering on the brink." The performers are Jakob B. Goode and Josephine Public. There is no real story - rather, we get a sort of vaudeville act with some audience participation.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Innkeeper, The
Famosa Mimosa

 (see Criticopia International listing under "Locandiera, La")

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
January 1997
Invisible Man, The
Shaw Festival - Royal George Theatre

 For all its discussions of man, god, science vs. religion, and the tyranny of conformity, The Invisible Man is basically a sci-fi melodrama about a mad scientist. Michael O'Brien's dark, brooding play doesn't even really work beyond the conventional excitement of a monster play. Will they catch him? Who's gonna get hurt? And wouldn't it be fun to be invisible?

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Irma La Douce
Opera Comique

 If ever a musical froze a time and place, it's the one about the prostitute idealizing love in an era when women were either supposed to be mamas knowing best or stirring with thoughts of becoming independent. In `50s Paris, Irma the fille de joie of Montmartre, used what society deemed immoral means to become one of its moral members. She gave France its first international musical hit, though naughtier in Paris than later on Broadway or in Hollywood. The show remains -- like Irma -- funny and sexy.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Island Princess, The
Royal Shakespeare Company - Gielgud Theatre

 To me, the Gamelan Musicians playing percussively against the backdrop went a long way toward meriting The Island Princess' epithet, "A Discovery Play." Probably the lightest of the RSC's 2002 Swan Season of rarely performed Jacobean plays, this one from 1617 fascinates by its referents to modern concerns like colonialism and clashes among cultures and religions. Rather than dismiss its melodramatic and non-intellectual facets, I found the swashbuckling and sudden "switchings" of allegiances amusing and the language fun.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
I've Got Proof
Teatro dell'Archivolto

(See Criticopia International review(s) under "Carta Canta")

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
November 1999
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell
Old Vic

 What a treat! Peter O'Toole gives the performance of a lifetime, here, depicting the brilliant but alcoholic journalist, Jeffrey Bernard. This is not the first time he's played the role. In 1990, this play, so incisively written, won London's Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and was reprised for a limited engagement which began this July 27 and ended September 25, 1999. The Old Vic, a very large theatre in Waterloo that has two balconies, was packed to the rafters with an audience that responded enthusiastically to O'Toole and his merry cast's every move.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Jerry Springer: The Opera
National Theatre - Lyttelton

 What a coincidence: the new Jerry Springer is named David Soul. And award-winning (2004 Olivier for Best Actor) David Bedella, fresh from time out for filming, re-sizzles as Jerry's Warm-Up Man, and later Satan. Both look and act their risky parts perfectly in this raucous send-up of one "Jerry Springer moment" (on TV) after another (finally in hell, which is really not much different).

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2004
Jerry Springer: The Opera
National Theatre - Lyttelton

 The British musical has received its biggest jolt in ages via a most unexpected vehicle. What started out as a one-man show in 2001 has grown into a side-splitting extravaganza satirizing the sleazy American trash-TV show hosted by Jerry Springer (once the mayor of Cincinnati!). The result is Jerry Springer -- The Opera, a raunchy, scatological, foul-mouthed work of intentional tastelessness, with a score that is a pastiche ranging from Bach and Handel to modern country-and-western. One should leave one's intellect at home and just revel in the freakish fetishes on view.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 2003
Julius Caesar
Globe Theatre

 England is revered for its level of excellence in the theater, not only in the West End, but at the Old Vic, the RNC, Stratford-Upon-Avon, throughout the Provinces, and in summer theaters like Chichester and Bath. But when the American actor, Sam Wanamaker, blacklisted in the McCarthy era, came to London 50 years ago, he was shocked to find that the Globe Theatre, built in 1599 on the Bankside of the Thames River, original home to Shakespeare's plays, did not exist.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
August 1999
Julius Caesar
Globe Theatre

 Mark Rylance, the artistic director of the reconstructed Globe, has chosen to present Julius Caesar in 1999, since the play premiered at the original Globe in 1599 with an all-male cast of fifteen. For this quadricentennial production, Rylance has again used fifteen actors (14 Brits and one American) and only men (no big deal, since there are but two minor female parts). The audience of groundlings serves as the Roman populace.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Jumpers
National Theatre - Lyttelton

 I am an enormous admirer of Tom Stoppard, but I have to admit that Jumpers is my least favorite of his plays. Its main characters are George Moore, a philosopher trying to finish a lecture on the existence of God and the nature of good, and his wife Dorothy, a former musical-comedy star obsessed with astronauts on the moon. It is a whodunit, though we never find out the murderer. It is a farce, though there are long stretches of tedium. There is a troupe of ten yellow-clad philosopher-acrobats, though they are insufficiently used.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
June 2003
Kathakali King Lear
Globe Theatre

 This year's foreign guest troupe at the reconstructed Globe Theatre is the Annette Leday/Keli Company from India. Its repertory draws on the centuries-old tradition of Kathakali dance-drama that originated in the Kerala region of southern India.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
King Lear
Almeida at King's Cross

 Waiting on a periphery of King Lear's gorgeous, chandeliered mahogany great room, his daughters are understandably nervous. Doors fling open, and spotlights focus on a huge desk atop a rich Oriental rug, onto which the King strides. Before he makes his all-important televised abdication, King Lear elicits all-important flattery from them and promises he and his knights will have a place to cavort and carouse. Blonde-in-black Regan performs her camera-ready "love speech," followed by look-alike Goneril, assuming a side of the desk and happily topping her sister's act.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2002
Knock
Espace Marais

 In a "black box" used to present four plays a day for each of three or (in this case) four days a week, staging must needs be simple. But Michel B. Company's Knock, that relies on props rather than scenery, is simple-minded. Burlesquing a period satire that's still effective as written, inserting "Pink Panther" and similar music, and caricaturing already broad characters don't go down smoothly.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 1999
La Dame Aux Camelias
Marigny-Salle Robert Hossein

 The first mistake was adapting Dumas Fils' novel rather than the play he himself made from it. Why tinker with success? (It's said that Isabelle Adjani, for her return from a long cinematic career to the stage, ordered and set the tone for this adaptation of "Camille." But who would know for sure, as she declined to speak to the press before the production debuted.) No matter who determined the playing with time and point of view, it's often confusing.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
La Framboise Frivole dans Pomposo
Bouffes Parisiens

 Double Victor Borge, add Henny Youngman and Jack Benny with their violins -- but make the latter much larger, and then get ready for some outstanding, original humor based on cliches in musical performance, comedy, lighting and special effects. The name of the super pair, "La Framboise Frivole," is the same as that of their presentation, to which they add some tuxedoed pomposity and then shoot it down.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
La Locandiera
La Comedie Italienne

 Director Attilio Maggiulli sees Carlo Goldoni's La Locandiera as an essentially masculine play, though it centers on the feminist heroine, Mirandolina. She may be "Mistress of the Inn" she inherited from her father, but it is in his -- that is to say, masculine -- world in which she governs her business and the men who pursue her.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
La Lupa
Sala Grane, Teatro Franco Parenti

 Only a few pages long, Giovanni Verga's La Lupa offers some of the late-nineteenth-century Sicilian writer's most memorable characterizations, which Susanna Beltrami has transformed into a theater piece combining text and dance. The widowed wolf-lady (lupa) of the story frightens the villagers because of the insatiable look on her emaciated face. Openly desired by her, handsome young Nanni instead asks to marry her daughter, Maricchia. He gets his wish, but the lupa pursues him until she possesses his body and spirit.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
December 1998
La menagerie de verre
Atelier

 Usually when in France, I prefer to see plays written in French, or others I rarely if ever get to see elsewhere, or plays done in English for a bilingual audience. When a classic is offered by a noteworthy or unusual group, director or whatever, though, the promise of an unusual production then becomes a temptation I can't resist. Not only has The Glass Menagerie been frequently "on" in France, there is even a Paris theater named after the play! So it took the desire to see Irina Brook's interpretation to make me take it in. And a different experience it is!

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
La Nuit Juste Avant Les Forets
Theatre Clavel

 Heralded by myriad Metro posters, another version of La Nuite Juste Avant les Forets, to play briefly at Theatre de la Ville/Les Abbesses just after I was to leave Paris, was crosslisted in Officiel des Spectacles as dance. It's hard to imagine anyone being more agile than Emeric Marchand, a dancer as well as actor, with movements and diction seemingly designed by brilliant writer Koltes. It's just as difficult to believe a richer theater could more suitably house the working class down-and-outer who tells his story.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2000
La Paix du menage
Athenee Theatre Louis-Jouvet, Grande Salle

 It's not everyday one gets to see a play by the distinguished fiction writer Guy de Maupassant, and this one, like so many of his stories, is absolutely modern. Because of its interweaving of desire and infidelity as they affect a marriage, La Paix Du Menage ("The Peace Of A Household") has been compared to "Eyes Wide Shut," the film also based on a 19th century story, that one by Schnitzler.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 1999
La Perichole
Salle Favart at Opera Comique

 For his debut as Artistic Director of the Opera Comique, Jerome Savary brought with him a hit (or miss, depending on whether you listen to his strongly-opinionated fans or detractors) from his similar position at Paris' TNP. He's been working with La Perichole since 1977 at the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, Germany, as a popular operetta, developing what he now claims is a musical comedy. This kind of popular art, Savary insists, is what should be Opera Comique fare in the 21st Century.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
La Vie Parisienne
Opera Comique

 No sooner does the orchestra appear in the pit than the curtain parts and a colorful cast appears at an ornate railroad station singing the praises of the Chemin de Fer. The train's either brought them to or keeps them in Paris, their "place" designated by sumptuous dress, music-hall attire, or work clothes. The latter may be those of vendors, waiters, maids, cleaners, artists - some on their way to the Grand Hotel. A sign painter there pays the doorman for his hat and sign so he can get to a woman who's attracted him. So what if he has to go all the way into the audience?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2002

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