Brink!
Actors Theater of Louisville

Two anticipated features of each year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville are a themed anthology showcasing ATL's vibrant young Acting Apprentice Company and three Ten-Minute Plays in which selected apprentices display their talents. For the 33rd festival, the choices were a rites of passage anthology called "Brink!" and a half-hour show that included two comic episodes and one serious.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Ten-Minute Plays (2009)
Actors Theater of Louisville

 Two anticipated features of each year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville are a themed anthology showcasing ATL's vibrant young Acting Apprentice Company and three Ten-Minute Plays, in which selected apprentices display their talents.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Love, Sex and the IRS
Sunshine Brooks Theater

 The lovely young couple is frolicking on the couch. They appear to be so in love. He is Leslie Carroll Arthur (Michael Phillip Thomas), and she is Kate (Elisabeth Rebel), a perfect couple. Well, almost.

Leslie has been seriously dating Connie (Haley Palmer) and she, Kate, is about to be married to Jon Trachtman (William Parker Shore), Leslie's roommate. That's when prolific playwrights Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore's Love, Sex and the IRS starts to get complicated.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Guys and Dolls
Nederlander Theater

 Broadway is back, not the struggling one of 2009 but the uniquely flavorful Broadway of the '30's in this cleverly reconceived version, by director Des McAnuff which takes Guys & Dolls from its original '50s to the actual time that Damon Runyon wrote his "Musical Fable of Broadway" and (as reinvented for stage by Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling) lovingly encapsulated such irresistible, idiosyncratic denizens like Liver Lips Louie, Augie the Ox, Brandy Bottle Bates, Society Max, Scranton Slim, Joey Biltmore, The Greek, Harry the Horse (you've got to hear Jim Walton's equine laugh), a

Jeannie Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Hair
Al Hirschfeld Theater

 The excitement, the elation, shakes the theater at Hair (book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, music by Galt MacDermot) now on Broadway. It has the characteristics of other great musicals: terrific, memorable songs; sympathetic characters and a positive message of hope and joy that can't be resisted.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage
Abrons Arts Center - Harry de Jur Playhouse

Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, by James Craig, starts with three scholars talking about "Beowulf." Then the music (by Dave Malloy) starts -- it's thunk-a-thunk and dreary, slow and boring, all minor dissonance -- like a bad German expressionistic band from 1927. I'm sure that's what they intended, but it doesn't work for me as entertainment.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Golden Apple Dinner Theater

 Such energetic, entertaining fun! Since seeing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat decades ago while attending an American Theater Association convention, shortly after the musical opened on Broadway, I've never been a particular fan of Joseph. But lately I've become a very happy viewer of collaborations between Kyle Turoff, director, and Dewayne Barrett, choreographer. Put together, putting together Joseph, they've made me look forward to another visit to the Apple when the American Theater Critics Association meets in Sarasota, end of April into May.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Toxic Avenger, The
New World Stages

 The Toxic Avenger is a dynamite little rock musical staged hilariously by director John Rando and choreographer Wendy Seyb, and performed by superb, versatile, Broadway-level actor/singers: Nick Cordero in a sympathetic star turn as Toxie, the amazing Nancy Opel in a duet with herself, Mathew Salvidar and Demond Green spectacular in multiple roles and Sara Chase as Sarah, the sexy, blind, blonde heroine.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Be Aggressive
New Village Arts Theater

 A play focused on cheerleading? Are they kidding? That's exactly what San Diegan Annie Weisman's Be Aggressive does. But oh so much more! New Village Arts Theatre's latest production under Kristianne Kurner's deft directorial touch is a challenge to the mind as well as a feast for the eyes.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Happiness
Lincoln Center - Mitzi Newhouse Theater

 Remember Steambath or Outward Bound? Plays that take place in limbo where people don't know they're dead? Happiness, book by John Weidman, music by Scott Frankel, lyrics by Michael Korie, now at Lincoln Center, is another one, and this time, the transition vehicle is a subway car filled with a warm, friendly cross-section of New York. They are to pick a happy time in their lives, revisit it, and then can stay there forever. An earnest Hunter Foster is the conductor, and all of the very large cast can sing well.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
reasons to be pretty
Lyceum Theater

 In reasons to be pretty [sic], writer Neil LaBute gives good argument. Set in a warehouse, the play starts with a well-performed (by Marin Ireland and Steven Pasquale), amusing filthy word-filled (by the wife) battle - a screaming, idiotic fight sprinkled with clever expressions. It's all very well directed by Terry Kinney, but it seems to me to be built on a sophistry: that saying the obvious truth about someone's looks will destroy a relationship. LaBute has the wife insist that saying that a woman in dreary clothes who wears no makeup is "regular" is a gross insult.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Hair
Al Hirschfeld Theater

 First produced in 1967 downtown at the Public Theater, this "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" packed a powerful punch. Hair hit the mark at a time when many were protesting the Vietnam War, as were the anti-establishment "hippies" in the show.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
March 2009
Royal Family, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

 George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's The Royal Family first opened on Broadway 82 years ago, and this domestic comedy about a leading theatrical family and their squibbles and squabbles is still totally entertaining theater. It's poseurs posing -- the myths and affectations of being in thee-atah, dahling is directed with a lively pace, superb timing and clean staging of its manic doings by Doug Hughes.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2009
Ladies Man, The
Geva Theater - Mainstage

 Act 2 of The Ladies Man, adapted by Charles Morey from Tailleur pour Dames by Georges Feydeau, has quite a few laughs. There's much in Feydeau that is just too good to kill, no matter how ineffective the production or how damaging the adaptation. But Morey's well-cast, much traveled and repeated reworking of the great French farceur's first success doesn't make much sense (not even comic sense) and is deliberately directed to produce cynical-looking shtick.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Defiance
GableStage

Defiance is John Patrick Shanley's follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning Doubt. That one focused on ethical and hierarchical responsibilities at a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964 on the cusp of Vatican Council changes. This one does the same for the U.S. military a few years later, in 1971 at Camp Lejeune.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Glass Menagerie, The
New Theater

More than 60 years after its 1944 debut, The Glass Menagerie still has the power to move, as New Theater in Coral Gables shows. Under artistic director Ricky J. Martinez, the play gets an involving, ultimately haunting production.

Today's audience and the Tennessee Williams characters of the Great Depression both are operating in difficult economic times amid wars abroad, but this production succeeds with on-the-money performances and imaginative staging, not historical parallels.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
February 2009
Waiting for Godot
The Light Box

Mad Cat Theater Company's artistic director, Paul Tei, told the Saturday night Miami audience he'd gotten the idea to mount Waiting for Godot scant weeks before as he watched television coverage of a desperate New Orleans isolated after Hurricane Katrina.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
October 2005
Cradle Will Rock, The
10th Avenue Theater

Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, currently under Lindsey Duoos Gearhart's direction, is staged by Stone Soup Theater Company at the 10th Avenue Theater. The play has an interesting past. In January 1936 Bertolt Brecht suggested to Blitzstein that he expand his short piece. Over an intensive five-week period ending on September 2, 1936, the musical play was finished, and he dedicated it to Brecht.

Robert Hitchcock
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Rock of Ages
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Rock of Ages is a retro-rock musical with ol'-timey R & R from the '80's with good loose action and half-naked ladies dancing in the aisles. What's not to like? They have jig-sawed a pastiche into an almost romantic story as the plot. It's soft-edged when they construct a story based on the songs, though the numbers are hard-edged.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Belasco Theater

Bartlett Sher's directorial conception of August Wilson's magnificent play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, has opened up the drama to new dimensions that reach far beyond the home of this Pittsburg family in 1911. The innovative, stylized set by Michael Yeargan, with lighting by Brian MacDevitt, is magical and reaches to infinity, and so do we as we experience the lives of people in a boarding house.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
How I Became a Pirate
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts: Todd Wehr Theater

A comical group of dim-witted pirates take a young boy on the ride of his life in How I Became a Pirate, a musical based on a book of the same title by author Melinda Long. The show is being produced by First Stage Children's Theater, Milwaukee's largest and best-known children's theater company.

After hoisting the Jolly Roger, the pirates display their own jolly talents, which include singing, dancing and playing an impressive variety of musical instruments. The show goes full-throttle as the pirates teach young Jeremy the basics of their life.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Spider's Web, The
Coronado Playhouse

 Agatha Christie is an institution. She has written 80 detective novels, many featuring Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple. Her collected sales total approximately $4 billion. Only the Bible has sold more copies. Her books have been translated into at least 56 languages. Did you know she wrote romances under the name Mary Westmascott? It's a wonder that she had time for two husbands...well, both were philanderers. Her The Mousetrap opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on November 25, 1952 and is still running.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Murder Among Friends
PowPAC

 What better way to celebrate a New Year's Eve then to have the perfect murder? That is exactly what the characters in Bob Barry's Murder Among Friends have done. In fact their plans are exactly alike down to every detail as wife plans hubby's demise and he hers.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Psychopathia Sexualis
Compass Theater

 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German sexologist and psychiatrist, wrote "Psychopathia Sexualis" in 1886. The book contained studies on sexual perversity. 110 years later John Patrick Shanley wrote Psychopathia Sexualis, a play exploring one such perversity - the inability to have sex without a pair of argyle socks close by. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Norman Conquests, The
Circle in the Square

British playwright Alan Ayckbourn has a penchant for complex theatrical architecture in constructing his plays, which are mostly innovative domestic comedies. The Norman Conquests, now at Circle in the Square on Broadway, is one of his boldest experiments: three separate plays, each a viable entity in itself, with the same characters, covering the same time span, in three settings at a Victorian estate.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Mary Stuart
Broadhurst Theater

Peter Oswald's very long, very talky new version of Friedrich Schiller's 1800 play, Mary Stuart, directed by Phillida Lloyd, gives us two strong women, Harriet Walter as Queen Elizabeth in a complex powerful performance, and Janet McTeer as Mary. As usual, McTeer is a powerful presence, but here, she is a declaimer who sings many of her lines in a kind of hammy recitation, especially as the play winds to its foregone emotional conclusion.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Burn the Floor
Post Street Theater

Burn the Floor is aptly titled. The show features sixteen ballroom dancers, split between men and women, who make fire with their feet as they interpret in virtuouso, redhot fashion such dances as the foxtrot, Lindy hop, samba, salsa, Quickstep, Paso Doble and tango. Each dancer is a world-class performer, having won more than a hundred dance titles between them.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Altar Boyz
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts - Vogel Hall

Although Altar Boyz has been wowing Off-Broadway audiences for four years, this is the musical's first appearance in Milwaukee. It's a shame that this show's high-pumped fun has waited so long to arrive. This is a Christian boy band that truly rocks. Their opening number, "We Are the Altar Boyz," is snappy enough to rival almost any Broadway opening number.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Rabbit Hole
North Coast Repertory Theater

Life is a continuing series of events. Are they random or interconnected? The dog runs out of the yard and the kid chases after it. In the case of four-year-old Danny, his dog runs out into the street, Danny follows it and gets killed by a passing car driven by a 17-year-old eight months ago. These are the events leading up to the opening of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Rabbit Hole, currently on North Coast Rep's stage in Solana Beach.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Mauritius
Cygnet Theater - Rolando Stage

 Fanatical philatelist is freaky! Prolific playwright, screenwriter, TV writer, fiction writer, novelist Theresa Rebeck has crafted a delightfully twisting tale of cons, deceit, and lies in Mauritius. Premiering in San Diego at Cygnet Theatre's Rolando Stage under director Francis Gercke's creative hand, the play challenges the audience to try to find the truth.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Hamlet
The Duke

 Hamlet, clearly directed by David Esbjornson and now at The Duke on 42nd Street, is a well-crafted, modern dress (costumes by Elizabeth Hope Clancy), contemporary rendition of Shakespeare's play with a fine actor, Christian Camargo, in the title roll, my old mime teacher, Alvin Epstein, as a crotchety Polonius, and a mostly strong supporting cast on an imaginative set by Antje Ellerman with fine lighting by Marcus Doshi.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Veronica's Room
Patio Playhouse

 Susan (Alisha Perry), a young college student, and Larry (Chaz Close), a lawyer she has just met, are dining at a fashionable restaurant. A seemingly nice older couple invites them to their home. Thus ends the back story as the older Irish couple enters Veronica's Room.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Cripple of Inishmaan, The
Lyceum Theater

The Aran Islands are off shore of Galway on the west coast of Ireland. They consist of three islands: Inishmore, Inishmann, and Inisheer. In English playwright Martin McDonagh's second play of his second trilogy, The Cripple of Inishmaan, he explores a bit of the culture shared by some 1,400 people. Their isolation from the mainland on these bare, stony islands is so complete that Gaelic is still everyday speech.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Evie's Waltz
Geva Theater - Nextstage

Carter Lewis's small-scaled exploration of the currently terrifying generation gap at first seems conventional and correctible discord, but with surprising inexorability it becomes an explosion of heartbreaking hopelessness. We know that Gloria (Annie Fitzpatrick) is trying to convince herself more than to convince her husband Clay (Skip Greer) that she feels only anger at her son Danny, still uncommunicative upstairs as the couple prepare a meal on the patio. Danny has evidently produced a gun in school and been sent home.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Mechanical, The
Theater for the New City

 Bond Street Theater's The Mechanical, written and directed by Michael McGuigan, is a stylized fairy tale for adults woven around Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" - a disassembling and reassembling of the original, with references to other mechanical creations like Pinocchio, and the titular Mechanical -a chess-playing machine from the 1800's.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Mary Stuart
Broadhurst Theater

 At last we are in for a piece of shining, highly theatrical theater! Mary Stuart has arrived, its two glowing stars, Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, direct from London's noted Donmar Warehouse and London's West End, and joined here by 11 supporting actors.

Originally written by Friedrich Schiller, this new version by Peter Oswald is fluid and easy, not at all smacking of the stilted "classic" tone. One is immediately swept up by the vivid rivalry between two major historical figures, Mary, Queen of Scots, cousin of Elizabeth I, Queen of England.

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Yeats Project, The
Irish Repertory Theater

 Noted Irish theatre critic Fintan O'Toole has written, "More than a half century after his death, William Butler Yeats is still Ireland's foremost avant-garde playwright."

Diana Barth
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Brooklyn Boy
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

 Milwaukee is a long way from Brooklyn, New York, but the universal themes in Donald Margulies' Brooklyn Boy can make a Midwestern audience feel right at home. The Milwaukee Chamber Theater pulls out all the stops in this production. For starters, it offers the best casting choices in recent memory. James DeVita is the story's protagonist, a middle-aged Jewish writer who finally has made The New York Times bestseller list with his latest novel. Titled "Brooklyn Boy," it is a semi-autobiographical tale of a kid who grows up and leaves Brooklyn forever. Or so he thinks.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Tale of Peter Rabbit, The
Dallas Children's Theater

 Upon entering the theater, the first thing that commands our attention is the fabulous set designed by Randel Wright. Including a superb upstage diorama, the entire stage for Kathy Burks Theater of Puppetry Arts' production of Peter Rabbit is filled with a replica of Mr. McGregor's garden.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Pay Attention
Santa Monica Playhouse - The Other Space

 Frank South's solo show, Pay Attention (reviewed on preview night), is still very much a work in progress. As developed by Margaret South (Frank's wife) and Mark Travis, the piece now runs an uninterrupted and somewhat grueling two hours. No doubt it can and will be whittled down, but even in its overly long, often-repetitive state it is powerful and moving enough to make it worth seeing.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2009

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