Necessary Targets
Fort Lauderdale Children's Theater - The Studio

 Playwright Eve Ensler, known for The Vagina Monologues went to Bosnia in 1995 to interview women caught up in the violent unraveling of the Balkans, specifically the Muslim refugees escaping Serb atrocities. Necessary Targets is the result. The South Florida-based Women's Theater Project gave it its southeastern U.S. premiere in August 2004 in a production so well received that it has been produced again by the same director and cast in a bigger venue. It hasn't lost a thing to time and space.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Sister Cities
Cooper City Theater

 In Sister Cities, three grown sisters scattered across the nation arrive at the home of their mother upon receiving word, from a fourth, of her death the day before. More surprising to them than her demise – mom had been sick a long time -- is that her lifeless body still is in the bathtub upstairs.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2007
Mauritius
New Theater

 The program of Mauritius, the Theresa Rebeck Broadway play getting its southeastern debut at New Theater in Coral Gables, promises "a sinister comedy about stamps." In the spirit of that alliteration, let it be known that the play has a serious side involving half-sisters (same mom. different fathers) and that the staging reflects the tale's split personality.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Waiting for Godot
Studio 54

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was a breakthrough play that introduced a new era in theatrical experimentation by using a simple situation to explore deep issues like the bleakness of life on earth. Santo Loquasto's set, for the current version now on Broadway, is an unbleak landscape; what should be a barren expanse stretching to infinity with one bare tree and a couple of rocks is filled with huge boulders - suggesting caverns behind them and possible hiding places -- undercutting the sense of the play.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Lend Me a Tenor
OnStage Playhouse

 Aspiring singer/Cleveland Grand Opera Company functionary Max (Brian P. Evans) is having a bad day. World-famous visiting tenor, Tito Merelli (Dave Rivas), is late for a performance, and Max' boss and father of his girlfriend, Henry Sanders (Jeff Laurence) is chewing the scenery. To compound his problems, his lovely girlfriend, Maggie Saunders (Robin Boyington), is enamored with Tito. And this is only the beginning!

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Phoenician Women, The
Under Hotel Churchill

The Theater Inc. is not content with bringing their audiences usual contemporary fare. Currently they are performing Euripides' The Phoenician Women. The translation is by Marianne McDonald PhD, one the foremost Greek scholars a and translator of many Greek plays. In the fall, they will be premiering her original work, Fires in Heaven. Late summer they will be producing Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour. Quite a season!

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Little Dog Laughed, The
Diversionary Theater

 Agent Diane (Karson St. John) has a serious problem with her client, ready-for-prime-time actor Mitchell (Brian Mackey). It seems he has more than just eyes for the very attractive Alex (Bryan Bertone), a rent-boy. As Alex explains to his girlfriend, Ellen (Kelly Iversen), it's just a job. Obviously, Mitchell's Hollywood career is on the line, as is Diane's increased power as a star's agent.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
9 to 5
Marquis Theater

Don't go to see the new musical 9 to 5 unless you want to have a foot-stompin' good time. The sharp book by Patricia Resnick (based oh the film), snappy, innovative choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler and crisp, clean direction by Joe Mantello, take the entertainment to the highest level in this story of three women employees versus the mean, misanthropic .boss, played by Marc Kudisch, one of the most exciting Broadway stars we have.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Nine to Five

 See Criticopia review(s) listed under "9 to 5"

Three Postcards
Historic Asolo Theater

 After the show I asked a friend and staunch supporter of the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training if she had seen Three Postcards about 20 years ago as a regular also at Florida Studio Theater. Said she: "If I had, I wouldn't have come tonight." That earlier experience, however, had forewarned me: it was a disappointing show about three women done by anything-but-disappointing actresses. Though the musical supposedly has been revised since its debut in 1987, I detected but a few changes -- like updated references, for example, to the film "Thelma and Louise."

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Bed and Sofa
Cygnet Theater

 The silent film, "Bed and Sofa," written and directed by Russian Abram Room in 1927, satirized the housing shortage problems in Moscow. The 1996 musical honors the original film, maintaining a dialogue-free script done only in music and lyrics.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Annie Get Your Gun
Lewis Middle School

 I don't know of another show that has so many hits in it as Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun. Opening with "There's No Business Like Show Business," then continuing with "They Say It's Wonderful," and "The Girl that I Marry." Precious few shows have had such lasting appeal from its Broadway opening in 1946 with a run of 1,147 shows to the revivals in 1966 and 1999. It was in 1999 that Berlin's "I'll Share it All With You" and "Who Do You Love I Hope" was added.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Dirty Dancing
Pantages

 "Dirty Dancing" was a low-budget, unexpected movie hit in 1987, thanks to the chemistry of leads Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, the contributions of choreographer Kenny Ortega and director Emile Ardolino, and a soundtrack whose main song, "I've Had the Time of My Life," won an Oscar. A TV series was followed by a stage version which premiered in London three years ago and is now touring the USA and elsewhere. A story that was once small and intense has been puffed up over the years and made a lot more slick and glitzy, more Broadway-like, if you will.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Chapter Two
Legler Benbough Theater

 Faye Medwick (Michelle DeFrancesco) is married and in search of an affair. Leo Schneider (Sven Salumaa) is a player and will play any woman that comes near him. Jennie Malone (Amy Fritsche) finally has gotten a divorce and has absolutely no interest in men. George Schneider (Howard Bickle, Jr.) recently lost his wife and is still in mourning. What do these four people have in common?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
Kirk Douglas Theater

The USA's misadventures in Viet Nam were captured in memorable theatrical fashion by David Rabe's trilogy and John DiFusco's Tracers. Now, the Iraqi War has spawned a play to match those important, ground-breaking works -- Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, by Rajiv Joseph. Set in 2003, the play centers on two young American marines, Tom (Glen Davis) and Kev (Brad Fleischer), who have been assigned to guard duty at the Baghdad Zoo, which has been bombed by the U.S. army as part of its "shock and awe" tactics in Iraq.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Dumb Show
Nova Southeastern University - Mailman Hollywood Center Auditorium

 The Promethean Theater's production of Joe Penhall's "Dumb Show" impresses even before it begins, and it doesn't let up through its two acts of silliness, satire and squirm-inducing drama involving celebrities and Britain's tabloid newspapers.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Old Wicked Songs
North Coast Repertory Theater

 Seldom does a play actually move an audience; most are stories we soon forget about people who will be remembered for a day or two. That is far from the case with Jon Marans' Old Wicked Songs.

The action takes place over several months in 1986. Young American pianist Stephen Hoffman (Tom Zohar) has developed a very serious artistic block. He has traveled to Vienna and is under the tutelage of renowned Professor Josef Mashkan (Robert Grossman). Director David Ellenstein cast an ideal contrast.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Pull of Negative Gravity, The
American Heritage Center for the Arts

 It would be difficult to find a cast more committed to a play than the four people performing The Pull of Negative Gravity at Mosaic Theater, and it would probably be as difficult to find staging so ably in support of a work. So it's disheartening that the play itself isn't more committed to its heartfelt, angry task of exploring the damage wrought on the body of a soldier wounded in Iraq in the present conflict and to his family's emotional equilibrium upon his return to Wales.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Fences
Geva Theater - Mainstage

 I don't know why August Wilson specialist Stephen McKinley Henderson, who was announced to direct this production, didn't; but, though he might have achieved a slightly more elegant subtlety [like his authoritative acting in Wilson's plays], I doubt he would have significantly improved Geva Theater artistic director Mark Cuddy's work on this beautiful revival of Fences. It is a landmark achievement for Cuddy and for his theater.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Tonight at 8:30: Brief Encounters
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater

 Ontario's great Shaw Festival's opening week of five productions began disappointingly but fortunately finished with two memorably fine revivals of modern classics, both new to Shawfest: a rewarding matinee of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon For the Misbegotten and a delicious new staging that evening of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Moon for the Misbegotten, A
Shaw Festival - Court House Theater

 It's hard to imagine why the Broadway premiere of this searing, beautiful play was received with such indifference. Its first production in 1947 was a disaster for many reasons and withdrawn from a planned Broadway debut; but the apparently fine 1957 revival with the splendid cast of Wendy Hiller, Cyril Cusack and Franchot Tone left few O'Neill admirers convinced that this was one of his best plays, and it ran for only 68 performances. Not until the legendary 1973 Broadway revival directed by Jose Quintero and starring Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards Jr.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Nights of Noir
Attic Theater & Film Center

Somebody forgot to tell writer/director Kasey Wilson that satires of 40s private-eye movies aren't exactly hot ideas today, although it's possible that a comic sketch along those lines might have seemed briefly fresh and funny. Wilson, though, opted to make a full evening out of her parodies of films like "The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon." Big mistake.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Born Yesterday
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater

Rumor has it that Garson Kanin got gag-writing suggestions from George S. Kaufman for Born Yesterday. In any case, the comedy, Kanin's most successful, has become a recognized classic, fairly crackling with witticisms and endlessly timely in its political satire. Its only problem is the popularity of the 1950 film which preserves Judy Holliday's incomparable, award-winning performance as Billie Dawn: inevitably, actresses following her in the role get compared to Holliday as often as actors playing the King in The King and I are compared to Yul Brynner.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Sunday in the Park With George
Shaw Festival - Royal George Theatre

 
I am not one of this Pulitzer Prize-winning musical's many admirers. I like its ideas and was knocked out by the Act One curtain tableau (on Broadway) which reproduces George Seurat's famous painting, "A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte."

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Baby with the Bathwater
North Park Vaudeville

 When one decides to see a play written by Christopher Durang, one must be prepared to be challenged. In Baby With The Bathwater all forms of logic must be suspended. You simply sit back to be bemused as the playwright twists and turns farce, satire and wackiness in a strange tale.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Marvelous Party, A
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

 Punctuating Noel Coward's witty songs, lyrics, aphorisms, chatter with both sonorous sophistication and often high pacing, A Marvelous Party nonetheless comes up short of the talent it celebrates.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Four Dogs and a Bone
New Village Arts Theater

 Two actresses, claws full extended. One sleazy film producer and a tyro playwright who just want to get a film completed... just another day in a not-to-far-from-reality satirical look Hollywood. Prolific playwright John Patrick Shanley (Sailor's Song, Doubt, Psychophathia Sexualis, and many more) has an intimate knowledge of Hollywood. His hilarious Four Dogs and a Bone, currently at New Village Arts in Carlsbad, severely slashes at stereotypical Hollywood characters.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Souvenir
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 I laughed 'til I cried.

Souvenir prompts both reactions because, though its self-deceived coloratura heroine gives unbelievably bad vocal performances (except "in her head"), her pianist accompanies her to a relationship that's mind-changing and heartfelt.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Bad Night in a Men's Room Off Sunset Boulevard
Compass Theater

 We all make mistakes. Most are inconsequential and private. Some, however, are life changing; especially in 1982. In the case of Michael (Douglas Myers), an indiscretion in a gay restroom ends his budding film career and makes him question his sexuality. Thus begins Ira Bateman-Gold's Bad Night in a Men's Room Off Sunset Boulevard, currently running at Compass Theater.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Festival, The
Swedenborg Hall

 H. P. Lovecraft's The Festival is an experience. House lights dim, both the house and stage are bathed in black light when we hear Walter Ritter's deep voice echoing in Swedenborg Hall with, "I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me."

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Lonesome West, The
10th Avenue Theater

 As I climbed the stairs to my seat at the 10th Avenue Theater, I saw the audience and wanted to shout for joy; I was the oldest by a couple of generations. There were senior high school and university students. San Diego, there may be hope for theater after all.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Cygnet Theater

 Six years ago, Cygnet Theater opened its doors to the public for the first time. It is fitting that the first show, a glam-rock musical titled Hedwig and the Angry Inch should be the last show at Cygnet's Rolando stage. We had been to the space many times when it was called the Actor's Asylum. It was also the theater where I saw Fridays with Maureen, the work of another reviewer, Cuauhtémoc Quetzalcoatl Kish. Ah the memories of the plays presented in the space.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Importance of Being Earnest, The
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

 Internationally acknowledged as a master of Comedy of Manners, both as actor and director, Brian Bedford unsurprisingly gives us a classic, landmark revival of Oscar Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. Bedford's directorial hand is evident in the elegance and wit of this exquisitely designed production, not least in his actors' perfect delivery of the dialogue, which – although familiar to most of us and easily the most clever use of language in English drama – here makes us attend to every speech and delight in it as if only now encountering it.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Butcher of Baraboo, The
Diversionary Theater

If at all possible never, never accept an invitation to visit Valerie (Linda Libby), the town butcher, or her daughter Midge (Wendy Waddell), the local pharmacist. Their kitchen's crowded countertop features a full knife block and an extremely menacing meat cleaver. Valerie seems to fondle the cleaver with way too much tender loving care. Note, too, that there may or may not have been several murders, suicides, or runaways in recent history.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
New Perspective Festival
Swedenborg Hall

 The New Perspective Festival returns with 24 new short plays by 17 San Diego Playwrights performed by about 60 actors under 21 directors. The principals behind the festival are Festival Director Kelly Lapczynski, Tech Director Marie Miller, Company Stage Manager Lizzie Silverman, and Publicity Coordinator Sally S. Stockton. My regret is that because of scheduling conflicts, I'll only see one night of eight plays, sadly missing sixteen others.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Night Sky
Baruch Performing Arts Center - Rose Nagelberg Theater

 Night Sky, a play by Susan Yankowitz, tells of an intellectual woman whose life comes to a crashing divergence with the onset of aphasia as a result of an accident. While the process the woman, brilliantly played by Jordan Baker, goes through is academically interesting, the writing is, in a way, naïve in terms of theater. There is quite ordinary familial interaction both before and after the accident as the main character goes through the slow, painful process of rehab.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Coming Home
Fountain Theater

 The Fountain Theater has done well with South African playwright Athol Fugard's previous plays, but it stumbles badly with his latest, Coming Home, which is now in a West-Coast premiere run. The problem, though, is with the play, not the production.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Chorus Line, A
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

"And a five, six, seven, eight -- " with those words, another performance of A Chorus Line kicks off, and the audience is transported to the strange world of musical dancers. Ironically, this musical about chorus "boys" and "girls" has given jobs to hundreds of real-life dancers/actors over the years. The original production ran for years, just as the revival did. And, as predicted in the musical's storyline, some members of the original cast have become well-known names in musical theater, while others disappeared from show business.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Over the Tavern
North Coast Repertory Theater

 I laughed so hard tears rolled down my cheeks, and that was just the first ten minutes of North Coast Rep's San Diego premiere of Tom Dudzick's Over the Tavern.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Macbeth
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

 Oddly enough, the only production Des McAnuff had directed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival before becoming its artistic director in 2008 was a not-well-received Macbeth in 1983.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009

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