Blur
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

What did Melanie Marnich do with material for -- as well as the form of -- a novella or a cinematic scenario? Apparently, because she's a playwright, and a "hot" one at that, she made the play Blur . As such, it's got faults not entirely dismissed by attempts to be "quirky" or "original" but, happily for members and fans of FSU/Asolo Conservatory, it gives actors ample chance to show their stuff. In fact, they're riveting in the few scripted highlights, like showing the heroine's birth-through-to-teens as well as a zoo scene with her young adult friends like caged animals.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Women Beware Women
Theater at St. Clement's

Women Beware Women, a 400 year old play by Thomas Middleton, is being given a lushly-costumed production by a fine classical company, Red Bull Theater. Intrigue, romance, honor and dishonor, deception, betrayal, murder-- it's a real soap opera of sin, and as a sample of its time, it's quite enjoyable, especially the pageantry in Act Two.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Adding Machine
GableStage at Biltmore Hotel

 On its way to becoming a musical a couple of years ago, Elmer Rice's 1923 expressonistic play, The Adding Machine, lost its definite article and a bunch of
speaking roles but picked up a three-piece band and – judging from its current GableStage production – quite possibly a new generation of fans.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Bombshells
Miracle Theater

I flew to Miami to attend the world premiere of the new musical, Bombshells, book, lyrics and music by Jeannette Hopkins, and found a terrific show with a powerful theme: communion among women. The original stories are in the book, "Dish and Tell: Life, Love and Secrets," by the Miami Bombshells, a group of six women who met to interact and share their ongoing experiences. Hopkins took the tales and added sharp dialogue, lively original melodies, and lots of humor. The jokes range from chuckles to guffaws.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Relatively Speaking
PowPAC

Words, words, words...it's just how you string them together. Playwright Alan Ayckbourn, an accomplished wordsmith, can take a tired play form, farce, and delightfully string the words together to near perfection. Over the years, he has given us such gems as Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, and By Jeeves. Relatively Speaking, now almost 44 years old, still sparkles.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Occupant
Florida Studio Theater

Is Occupant a new dramatic species -- interview as drama? Is it a quirky take on a ghost story? Is it a tribute to Louise Nevelson's person and artistic work? Could it be Edward Albee's way of explaining an artist's need to become an artist? Like a staged "assemblage" (the word Nevelson used to describe her breakthrough sculptures), Occupant is all these things.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Edward Albee's Occupant

 (See Criticopia review(s) under "OCCUPANT")

Leaves of Glass
Peter Jay Sharp Theater

 Ahh those crazy Brits-- how they love the 3 D's in their theater: Depravity, Dysfunction, Death. Leaves of Glass, by Philip Ridley, at the Peter J. Sharp Theater on Theater Row, has all of them in abundance. There is no McDonough blood pouring off the edge of the stage, but there are ripped emotions, anguish, shreds of relationships pouring, bouncing, skittering, banging about.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Dresser, The
North Coast Repertory Theater

 Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, currently at North Coast Rep, is a two-man play with a cast of seven. Placed in 1942 England, it is the story of a traveling troupe touring for months in the hinterlands. They go from city, town or village to the next, carting their meager props, flats and costumes by train.

We are offered the opportunity to view their life back-stage of a small town theater and in the dressing room of the star, Sir (Jonathan McMurtry). It is here that we meet Norman (Sean Sullivan), his dresser.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Dig, The
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

A world premiere of The Dig, by Milwaukee playwright Marie Kohler, opened recently at Rennaisance Theaterworks. Staged in the intimate, 100-seat Studio Theater, The Dig is a family mystery that holds the audience's attention until the final curtain.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Spitfire Grill, The
Players Theater

 Something different for The Players: a small cast doing an area premiere of a relatively new musical by not-too-familiar creators. Though based on a mildly successful film, The Spitfire Grill is far from the kind of cult favorite that spawned campy hits
like Reefer Madness and Hairspray.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
American Plan, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

It's difficult to guess what prompted The Manhattan Theater Club to revive Richard Greenberg's The American Plan after eighteen years. It was previously produced (rather well) by them in 1991. Judging by the average age of their audience, we can assume many of the subscribers have already seen it. Although it is a strange and baffling play, it has many moments to relish (while others make you cringe).

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Rock and Roll
Actors Theater of Louisville

 Here's yet another fictitious rock band to join the (im)mortal roster that includes Spinal Tap, Josie and The Pussycats, Sweetwater and The Wonders. It's called Danger Seven and it emanates from Lansing, Michigan, in Actors Theater of Louisville's original new rock musical.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Longa Viagem de Volta pra Casa
Goodman Theater

 "It sounds almost Russian," my companion remarked of the mournful melody crooned by a trio of ragged buskers in the narrow corridor, lined with dockside down-and-outs, through which audience members were escorted into the Goodman's Owen Theater. The language was, in fact, Portuguese, but no country can claim a monopoly on the Blues -- a possible reason for the Brazilian Companhia Triptal's attraction to Eugene O'Neill's gloomy picture of the New England seafaring life.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Long Voyage Home, The
Goodman Theater

See Criticopia review(s) of Companhia Triptal's production under "Longa Viagem de Volta pra Casa"

Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Love Song
Cygnet Theater

He sits alone curled up in his only chair next to his only lamp in his blank-walled apartment. He sees nothing; he has no life, no interests, no nothing. The light dims as the walls of his apartment close in on him. This is the life of a man called Beane (Francis Gercke).

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
American Plan, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

 Richard Greenberg's The American Plan is a complex psychological drama played out against the background of summer in the Catskills in 1960. A borderline psychotic girl (the lovely Lily Rabe) whose mother (the vividly dynamic Mercedes Ruehl) is a treacherous, over-protecting controller, meets a handsome guy (Kieran Campion) who is a poor, gay New England aristocrat.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Hedda Gabler
American Airlines Theater

 Mary Louise Parker makes Christopher Shinn's new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler the best, most exciting version of the show I have ever seen. Her every word, every gesture is fascinating, magnetic. Her essence is sensual, her beauty radiates, especially as gowned by designer Ann Roth. It's a brilliant, many-layered performance as she restlessly prowls the stage like a feral tiger imprisoned in a small cage.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Lansky
St. Luke's Theater

 In Lansky, by Richard Krevolin and Joseph Bologna, the charismatic and fascinating actor Mike Burstyn gives us an odd portrait of a Jewish gangster, Meyer Lansky, who was the brains, the money-manipulator, behind a lot of Mafia activities during prohibition.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Trouble in Mind
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse Theater

In the right hands, even a half-century-old play can seem fresh and relevant. Example: the powerfully moving production of Trouble in Mind at Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Nightlife Awards (2009)
The Town Hall

 If Rosie O'Donnell had really wanted a successful, entertaining, and fast-moving variety show, she would have put producer Scott Siegel and director Noah Racey in charge. A savvy and sophisticated audience filled The Town Hall on Monday evening, January 26, for the 2009 Nightlife Awards. They rewarded the winners and others with the kind of enthusiastic response they deserved.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Going to St. Ives
Off-Broadway Theater

 Lee Blessing's play, Going to St. Ives, is memorable from the beginning. As the stage lights come up on a quaint and orderly English drawing room, one finds the imposing figure of a gorgeously dressed African woman. She is clad head to toe in an extremely colorful and regal garment that is patterned with a bold African design. She also wears a large gold necklace and gold-colored slippers. She stands alone, waiting for her host to arrive. What caused this odd combination?

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Kissing
New Theater

 Set in New York's Central Park, Kissing is a world premiere at New Theater in Coral Gables that has a lot to do with a man's midlife crisis and his flirtation with a younger woman. It's hard not to think of Woody Allen – there's even a bit about lobsters. And there's some similarity to "Groundhog Day." And at some point the mind wanders and you find yourself recalling the moment in "Moonstruck" when Olympia Dukakis tells the John Mahoney character, "You're a little boy and you like to be bad."

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
January 2009
Importance of Being Earnest, The
Paper Mill Playhouse

 To see The Importance of Being Earnest at the Paper Mill Playhouse on Super Bowl Sunday, with only about half the seats in the large theater filled, might not sound like theatrical heaven. But if this intimate, witty comedy can make an effect under such circumstances, as it did this past weekend, it's a sure indication that those involved are doing something -- or many things -- right.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Mirandolina
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Theater

Got the winter blues? Tired of dealing with economic doldrums? Then put on your boots and long underwear and hike over to the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's box office for tickets to Mirandolina. You're guaranteed to laugh the night away.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Speed-the-Plow
Ethel Barrymore Theater

 Speed-the-Plow by David Mamet-- what a trip! Mamet's scathing denunciation/exposition of the workings of the Hollywood jungle, where everyone is a whore and access is all, as performed by Raul Esparza, William H. Macy and Elisabeth Moss, is a gripping piece of theatricality. The snappy dialogue as twisted people fence for position in a depraved, insulated world of hypergreed is magnetic, and director Neil Pepe's sense of timing is thrilling.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Weekend Comedy
Sunshine Brooks Theater

Playwrights Jean and Sam Bobrick have captured the difference in the lifestyles of two generations in Weekend Comedy. This laugh-a-minute comedy is the current offering of New Vision Theater Company playing at Oceanside's Sunshine Brooks Theater. Not only is the play written by a husband and wife team, it is directed by one, Yolanda and John Kalb. The collaboration of both teams works.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Lobby Hero
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

If you're going to write a morality play, it helps to have a moral viewpoint. Unfortunately, Kenneth Lonergan seems as confused about truth -- is it absolute or relative? -- as his characters. In a Manhattan apartment hotel, the ironically-named title character, Jeff, frequently sleeps during his night shift and skirts rules laid down by strict supervisor William. A black achiever, worried about a crime his brother may or may not be involved in, William is intent on becoming a manager.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
August 2003
Lobby Hero
Studio Theater

Kenneth Lonergan's hit play, Lobby Hero, made its impressive Milwaukee debut on Valentine's Day. Audiences had been anticipating the production's arrival for months, based on the strength of the play's positive reaction in New York and London. Also fueling enthusiasm was a popular production of Lobby Hero that just ended its run in Madison, Wis. Thankfully, the play lives up to its hype. The opening night audience clearly enjoyed the clever wordplay and sly sight gags that give Lobby Hero its zany, contemporary twist.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2003
Lone Star / Laundry And Bourbon
Rudyard Kipling

Good ol' boys and the women who love them (or at least marry them and then tolerate them) populate the rural Texas town in which James McLure sets his sad/funny twin plays -- one for the women and one for the men. Laundry and Bourbon, the opener, takes place on the porch of Elizabeth's (Amber Davies) house. Her old high school classmate, now the mother of three rowdy kids, drops in to gossip and share a few bourbons and coke.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2007
Long Christmas Ride Home, The
Dowling Theater

This is Paula Vogel's 23rd play and the first since she won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive. This time, she acknowledges drawing inspiration from the early one-acts of Thornton Wilder, especially The Long Christmas Dinner and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden (which she read in high school). From the former, which seamlessly covers 90 years in a short period, she avoids strictly linear time; from the latter, she takes a car journey by parents and three children.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
May 2003
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Goodman Theater

Long Day's Journey Into Night was the Dysfunctional Family play that founded the genre as we know it today, and if this Goodman Theater production doesn't move to Broadway following its Chicago run, then New York's Theater District deserves to be converted into a daycare center. Robert Falls brings this epic-length confessional home in a record three-and-a-half hours with never an instant of time-stepping or fly-catching. And in spite of the Big-Name presence of the formidable Brian Dennehy, this is no star turn but a superb example of ensemble playing at its most virtuosic.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Looking For Normal
Geffen Playhouse

Jane Anderson's latest, a domestic drama with a vengeance, deals with the transgender issue in a somewhat superficial but engaging way. Beau Bridges, returning to the stage after 25 years, plays Roy, patriarch of a mid-west family who drops a bombshell on his loved ones by informing them he intends to undergo a sex change. Anderson draws him as a regular guy with no female mannerisms, so much so that it was hard for this reviewer to believe the play's basic premise.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Looking For Normal
Diversionary Theater

Roy and Irma have been married 25 years with two children, spunky Patty Anne, 13, and rebellious Wayne, 22. During a marriage counseling session with their minister, Roy admits to feeling that he is a woman trapped in a man's body. Jane Anderson's masterful play, Looking for Normal, explores the true reality of the dilemma with both humor and the intrinsic drama it causes.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Loot
Stamford Theater Works

It might be downright dangerous to present the loony black comedy, Loot, with the globe of a full moon overhead and an open coffin on the stage, but Stamford Theater Works took the gamble, and the result is purely good fun. Doug Moser's brisk direction of this stylish, six-member cast, led by the intrepid Ken Parker, who is at turns contentious and choleric as the honest and beleaguered widower, McLeavy, maintains a merry pace in this piece by English Playwright Joe Orton, never letting its meter run down for a moment.

Rosalind Friedman
Date Reviewed:
September 1999
Lot's Daughters
Diversionary Theater

Diversionary Theater's West-Coast premiere of Rebecca Basham's Lot's Daughters is a dramatic, dynamic success. This multi-award winning play is set in the Eastern Kentucky hill country during fall and winter 1944. Appalachia is one of the subcultures in the United States that has seen little change. Its isolation was a result of, at least in the war years, a lack of electricity and roads. Basham's world has the stereotypes we've come to expect: the bible-thumping preacher and his pious wife, the widower, the young daughters, and a brother going off to war.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
October 2001
Louie And Ophelia
Regency West Dinner Theater

A love story with heart and wit, Louie And Ophelia gives L.A.'s newest dinner theater, Regency West, a noteworthy debut production. All components of Gus Edwards' play, from the writing to the acting and directing, are first-rate. The room itself, located in the heart of L.A.'s black cultural scene, Leimert Park, is large and comfortable, with a raised stage that affords easy sightlines.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
Love Diatribe
Martin Experimental Theater at Kentucky Center for the Arts

Four years after his Love Diatribe opened in 1990 in New York, playwright/novelist Harry Kondoleon was dead of AIDS at age 39. In his later years this author of 17 plays and two novels made the horror of AIDS a central theme of his work. Love Changes Everything was the headline The New York Times put on its review of the play, and indeed it magically does in the final moments of The Necessary Theater's production.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2001
Love From a Stranger
Lamplighters Community Theater

If you like solving a mystery, you'll likely enjoy Love From A Stranger. Is Bruce a murderer or just extremely fond of macabre crimes? Is Cecily a murderess or just a frightened young lady? Based on an Agatha Christie story, Frank Vesper's twister weaves an interesting tale.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Love Of Three Oranges, The
La Jolla Playhouse

The Love of Three Oranges is based on Carlo Gozzi's fairy tale. This is not Prokofiev's opera, with its marches. It is a vision of Romanian Nona Ciobanu (director, co-scenic & costume Designer) and Iulian Baltatescu (co-scenic & costume designer, Lighting & Composer). It has the feel of commedia dell'arte in this American adaptation by James Magruder. He creates a language for the characters that is, at times, obtuse, and then he uses American slang almost as an aside. The piece thus wavers between aural confusion and amusement.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
September 2004

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