Because of Cain
Community Actors Theater

Community Actors Theater's current production is Because of Cain by local playwright Earl Hamilton, Jr. Two old buddies, Peter (Joseph Georges) and Keith (Andrew Goularte), meet after an absence of thirty years. Just why is Peter visiting Keith? Do they have anything in common anymore?

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Around the World in 80 Days
Cabot Theatre - Broadway Theater Center

 Somewhere between Monty Python and Groucho Marx, there is Around the World in 80 Days, Mark Brown's adaptation of the Jules Verne classic. It proves to be an excellent choice for beginning the Milwaukee Chamber Theater's current season (and its 35th anniversary).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Spek
TheaterLab

 Linda Olthof's Spek, a half hour physical action performance piece, influenced by painter Francis Bacon, gives us the concept "Without an Accident We Cannot Play." It starts with what looks like the result of an accident: a car crash or an explosion, with the bent and broken bodies of dancers flung about and plastered on the walls and floor of the open set. The company consists of two women who dance rather nicely, one actor who moves a bit and breathily groans much anguish, and one Dancer, Evelien Riemens.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Our Town
Barrow Street Theater

 Director David Cromer has put together a mostly exciting rendition of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, now playing at the Barrow Street Theater in Greenwich Village. With the action taking place in and around the audience, we become part of the life in the town of Grover's Corners in the early 1900's in this ultimate Americana play. It's the life of the ordinary, with no surprises. My friend who saw it with me, a lifelong New Yorker, said it was like an anthropological study.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Entertainer, The
Shaw Festival - Studio Theater

 Opening the Shaw Festival's new, intimate Studio Theatre, this potently staged and skillfully acted revival of John Osborne's brilliant, biting drama is, I suppose, a triumph for this great theater company, except that it has always been too long and too unpleasant to feel like a triumph. I'm not sure what it means that this is the first production I've seen [of three, including the original with Laurence Olivier] during which no one noticeably walked out.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Speaking Elephant
Sixth Star Studios

Two actresses stand erect on the stage, emitting occasional throaty sighs and grunts. Their right arms gesture. They're clad in gray from head-top turban to the toe-top ends of their wide-cut pants – otherwise called, appropriately in this case, elephant-leg pants. Their characters are elephants, and soon enough they're talking in a new play of much heart and many laughs getting a sterling premier in Fort Lauderdale by The Women's Theater Project.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Bible, The
Desi `n' Friends Bar

 To get to the Black Kat Theater, one enters through Desi 'n' Friends neighborhood bar on Lytton Street. You pass the pool table, the bar, and finally reach the ticket desk. Then you go back even further to the theater space. On an excellent night, almost 40 people can pack sardine-like into the audience space. The fans turn, but it is still warm. This, of course, keeps Tammy Pearson very busy bringing libation from the bar. You can even have something to eat.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Speed-the-Plow
GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel

 David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, a look at cutthroat decision-making in the movie business, gets an appropriately speedy production at GableStage: start to finish in under 90 minutes.

Outside of adjusting for inflation and for changing attitudes toward indoor smoking, there's no time warp two decades after its Broadway debut. But in what has become a 24/7 celebrity-driven information cycle, there may not be many surprises either. Still, the cast -- Paul Tei, Gregg Weiner and Amy Elane Anderson under director Joseph Adler-- keeps things steaming along.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Let Freedom Ring
Christian Community Theater

 The stage is one of the biggest in San Diego. The roof is stars. The theater is about 1,000 feet long and cluttered with aircraft. Yes, the USS Midway is Christian Community Theater's summer production venue. This year they bring us the world premiere of Eric Vest's musical, Let Freedom Ring, a patriotic score of music from WWI to the present under the direction of the composer and Paul Russell.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Sealed for Freshness
OnStage

 At least once in your lifetime, you should attend a Tupperware party. It is an anachronism from the '50s. Usually a group of women (although I've seen men at some parties) marvel at the latest in the, then, best plastic storage devices. It was a social gathering as well as an event to purchase whatever was the newest container.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Spring Awakening
Eugene O'Neill Theater

 Spring Awakening is a rock musical that gives us teenagers, hormones raging, trying to find out about sex in a repressive society. This youthful view of sexuality, based on an 1890s play by Frank Wedekind, deals with awkward young men (except for charismatic leading man Jonathan Groff) and pretty little nubile teenage girls. Directed with lots of energy by Michael Mayer, and filled with very odd, angular, eccentric choreography by Bill T. Jones, it is interesting in movement and action.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2006
Spring Awakening
Eugene O'Neill Theater

 The hottest Off-Broadway transplant of the season takes as its source an 1891 Franz Wedekind drama that dealt with teens discovering their sexuality without a shred of knowledge from their teachers or preparation from their Teutonic parents. Layered onto this quaint, excavated tragedy in Spring Awakening is a rocking song list that gives no quarter to the repressions of the bygone century, rawer and more defiantly punkish than any score that has hit Broadway before.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2007
Steel Magnolias
Lyceum Theater

 Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias is not a play for jaded cynics. It's a lovely production, and all you have to do to enjoy it is to sit back and let yourself be a participant in the lives of these Southern women, well played by a fine ensemble cast: Delta Burke, Lily Rabe, Frances Sternhagen, Rebecca Gayheart, Christine Ebersole and Marsha Mason. The humor is folksy Americana, the characters have a reality to them and zing lots of amusing lines as they congregate to communicate in the local beauty shop.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Stones in His Pockets
John Golden Theater

 The latest disappointment imported from overseas, Marie Jones' Stones in His Pockets is a play that dares to blast the opinion that smaller and more efficient is better, having two actors fill the roles of a cast of nearly fifteen. The set-up is: two extras, Jake (Sean Campion) and Charlie (Conleth Hill), find work on an Irish film set where a new picture is being shot, complete with order-barking director, a vain, accent-challenged ingenue; an overzealous production assistant and various others who pop in and out of the story.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Stones in His Pockets
John Golden Theater

Call it Greater Tuna for the upper crust. Sean Campion and Conleth Hill are undeniably marvelous as they play two dozen distinct, dimensional denizens of a small Irish town overrun by a Hollywood film crew. Longish and a bit predictable but also droll and good-hearted, with a second-act dance to rouse even the drowsiest.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2001
Streetcar Named Desire, A
Studio 54

 Only a few American plays can compare to A Streetcar Named Desire. And of our best plays, Streetcar is arguably the most distinctly American. When Blanche arrives in her sister's apartment, Stella tells her, "New Orleans isn't like other cities." This particular New Orleans certainly isn't. This is Tennessee Williams' city, where people do whatever they want with a distinctly American freedom from tradition.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Streetcar Named Desire, A
Studio 54

 Uh, oh. We are at the mercy of strange and foreign directors who don't understand the delicate sensibilities and balance needed in a Tennessee Williams play. Edward Hall, from across the pond, helms the current A Streetcar named Desire, and he has misdirected the talented John C. Reilly so badly, the play's real currents are lost. Williams' love of depravity, sexual tension, deteriorated people, the holes in shattered lives, the survival of the primitive, expressed in poetic terms, is undercut as Reilly shows Stanley rather that being him.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Shrunken Heads
Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Shrunken Heads, by M.Z. Ribalow, is a cute, cheery shot at farce with no reality as a shrink, his patient and family bring their conflicts to his country house.

Performances are quite good, full of jokes, verbal and physical, on an excellent set by Daniel Krause. In it course, the play mocks psychiatry, patients, marriages, New Age and youth, giving us some good laughs and a fun evening. A couple of martinis before the show would definitely add to the festivities.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Taming of the Shrew, The
New Theater

 The Taming of the Shrew gets a lively, commedia dell'arte-style staging in South Florida that delivers lots of laughs. It really isn't much of a stretch: The go-for-the-gags style was big in Italy, where the play takes place, at about the same time Shakespeare was working in England.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Dentist, The
Apex City Hotel

 Shatteringly powerful is the best way I can describe The Dentist, the one-woman show now playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Starring Razia Israely, the monologue proved to be one of the best things I've ever seen in the theater, drama of a rare and memorable quality.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
August 2009
Sweeney Todd
Eugene O'Neill Theater

 John Doyle has taken Sweeney Todd, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler, as adapted by Christopher Bond, and transformed it into a fully expressionistic, awe-inspiring production that may be the most exciting show now on Broadway. Doyle, who directed and designed the event, takes us, with marvelous stylization and amazing musical arrangements by Sarah Travis, into another dimension of theater.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2005
Sweet Charity
Al Hirschfeld Theater

 Director Walter Bobbie has transformed Sweet Charity into a charming contemporary tale, and since old versions are not playing across the street, why compare? Christina Applegate is an adorable, absolutely delightful, gamine, with both a grace and gracelessness that are totally captivating. The production (dazzling set by Scott Pask, fine lighting by Brian MacDevitt) around her is a slick contrast to her ingenuousness, with eccentric, stylized choreography by Wayne Cilento, who in some parts creates his own exciting new vocabulary.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Sweet Smell of Success
Martin Beck Theater

Another dark new tuner that demonstrates just how tough it is to create musical magic, even when the talent is there, the story is interesting, and a couple of songs catch the ear. John Guare's book shows real ingenuity at times (a build-up of sycophantic Sidney's behind-the-scenes machinations reaches a wonderful payoff in act one) but never clears up some crucial motivations or answers certain basic questions, such as what is J.J. Hunsecker's weird fixation on his sister really about, and why does protegee Sidney have no other career options?

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Sweet Smell of Success
Martin Beck Theater

 Sweet Smell of Success offers a brilliant, inspired cityscape set (once again) by the incomparable Bob Crowley with superlative lighting by the great illuminator Natasha Katz (once again), good songs by Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia, a book by John Guare, Broadway dancing at its best by a top-level ensemble imaginatively choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, the powerful John Lithgow filling the stage with his energy and presence - all snappily directed by the ever-innovative Nicholas Hytner.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2002
Taboo
Plymouth Theater

 The progression of a naive but talented waif who, through good people skills and sheer lucky breaks, becomes a star, is a time-honored one for Broadway musicals, but rarely has that scenario been more oddly put forth than in Taboo, a show by, about and starring Boy George (nee George O'Dowd) -- only he doesn't play Boy George. Instead he plays Divine-like downtown muse Leigh Bowery, who, with his outre garb and makeup, made himself a kind of living art, and thus inspired George's own star-making makeover.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
December 2003
Taboo
Plymouth Theater

 Taboo is closing. But it's a really good, completely entertaining show with marvelous performances and some of the best songs in town. The latter are by Boy George -- the ones that made him a star and others. But I guess Rock Freaks are not the cup of tea for visitors from Iowa. Taboo's an unapologetically, unabashedly gay show, and it seems the tourists are not ready for it.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2004
Take Me Out
Walter Kerr Theater

I can't recall this much cheering and all-around continuous excitement about a Broadway play since Angels in America. I'm not talking about pre-show hype or media attention, I'm talking about in the theater itself, as a truly enthusiastic audience watches Richard Greenberg's utterly captivating comedy-drama keep trotting the bases.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Tale of the Allergist's Wife, The
Barrymore Theater

 The Tale of the Allergist's Wife is a play that refers to many serious ideas without ever once having one of its own. Is that a bad thing? Depends. Do you want to think while at the theater, or would you prefer to pretend you've been thinking? For those who prefer the latter, Tale is ideal. Charles Busch's dialogue is certainly very funny, and Valerie Harper, who hasn't made me laugh since she played Rhoda on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, is sensational. I sat in the very back row of the rear mezzanine, and she sold every punchline with wit and physicality.

David Steinhardt
Date Reviewed:
December 2001
Tango Argentino
Gershwin Theater

 Tango Argentino is the show that started a real craze when it hit Broadway 14 years ago. This group of dancers and musicians don't aspire to the splashes of glitz and glamour that marked the Forever Tango troupe two years ago. This company was the first to mainstream the tango internationally, and it still appears rooted in integrity, if somewhat lacking in theatrical imagination. It remains a show designed more for purists than for tourists. The format for this presentation is simple: sensuous movement and evocative music.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
November 1999
Tartuffe
American Airlines Theater

 From director Joe Dowling comes a misfired Moliere that points up Tartuffe's structural weakness: all of the first half centers on papa Orgon refusing to listen to anyone. If he would just shut up for thirty seconds, there'd be no play. This leads to some labored, even annoying patches, especially with an uneven cast trying to put this Roundabout mounting over. Brian Bedford's always a pro but he feels a bit by-the-numbers here; Henry Goodman makes an interestingly earthy, almost Shylockish title character - I'd like to see his Tartuffe in a better production.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
January 2003
Tartuffe
American Airlines Theater

 Moliere's Tartuffe, now at the American Airlines Theater, is a great contemporary production of a 340-year-old play in a marvelous rhymed translation by Richard Wilbur. It's played against a somewhat ponderous period set by John Lee Beatty, with super costumes by Jane Greenwood which amplify with wit the characters' foibles. The first-rate cast includes Henry Goodman as the loathsome, slimy Tartuffe -- Goodman gives good loath and marvelous slime -- his eyes sparkle with glee in his villainy. Brian Bedford, perfect as his gullible victim, is the epitome of a self-righteous gull.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2003
Tarzan
Richard Rodgers Theater

 The spectacular opening of Disney's Tarzan takes us to another dimension: at sea, under sea, changing our perspective. Director/designer Bob Crowley, one of my very favorite designers in the world, outdoes himself with these visuals. After an uninspired song, we again get great physical action as the young Tarzan (a wonderful Alex Rutherford) is revealed.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
July 2006
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Marquis Theater

 In an effort to be thoroughly modern as well as thoroughly old-fashioned, Thoroughly Modern Millie turns out to be thoroughly rancid. After a slate of dreadful musicals this season (By Jeeves and Sweet Smell of Success among them), here comes yet another, and the worst part is it didn't have to be. Based upon a 1967 film by George Roy Hill that hardly needed reviving in any capacity, Millie could have taken that picture's best assets and thrown away what doesn't quite work (something The Full Monty did so wonderfully).

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Marquis Theater

With her stick-figure legs splaying every which way yet still suggesting a dancer's grace, with her belty voice and her game goofiness, Sutton Foster is the focal point of this new-but-feels-like-a-revival tuner, which initially plods like a watchable flop and then, after a couple of strong sequences and silly-funny surprises, turns into an audience-pleasing hit.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Marquis Theater

 I am happy to report there is practically nothing new in this deliciously old-fashioned musical. Therefore, its goal is to be entertaining -- how unusual in today's "modern" standards (and we all know how depressing the "modern" musicals have been!).

Jeanne Lieberman
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Marquis Theater

 Do you love an old-fashioned, high spirited, tap-dancing romantic musical with some really great performers and an airy, imaginative Deco set (by David Gallo)? Take a trip to New York in 1922 and to Thoroughly Modern Millie; you'll have a good time.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2002
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Marquis Theater

 The Tony-Award exploits of Sutton Foster are still on view in the title role of Thoroughly Modern Millie, more than sufficient reason to take advantage of "Season of Savings" discounts available at 1-800-ILOVENY and ilovenytheater.com. This budding superstar belts, taps and charms with the best of them. And the award-winning villainess, Harriet Harris, is still stopping the show with her dragon-lady shtick as Mrs. Meers.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
January 2003
Thou Shalt Not
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

Sometimes there's no specific reason why a show doesn't grab an audience, and Thou Shalt Not is a puzzling case in point. Apart from a couple of easily-corrected directorical miscues (like expecting the audience to applaud after a scene of choreographed coitus), there's nothing wrong, per se, with this new musical by David Thompson, Harry Connick, Jr. and director/choreographer Susan Stroman. In fact, it's usually pretty darn good: bouncy tunes, a viable, sexy-creepy story line; a lissome leading lady (understudy Dylis Croman) and a break-out supporting performer (Norbert Leo Butz).

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
November 2001
Thousand Clowns, A
Longacre Theater

 If nothing else, this revival of Herb Gardner's modern classic erases the bad taste left by the sour Judd Hirsch revival a few years back. Iconoclastic Murray has become sympathetic again, and for once we really understand why his well-paid job writing for a children's TV show has become an unendurable nightmare. Helping are fine supporting performances from Robert LuPone, Mark Blum and especially Bradford Cover, who imbues the thankless role of social worker Albert with pathos and confusion.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
July 2001
Three Days of Rain
Bernard B. Jacobs

 Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain, now on Broadway, is two plays. Act 1 in 1995 shows us the consequences of events in the early lives of three people, and Act 2 is 1960 and gives us the parents of the characters in Act 1. That's where we understand the references and what the title means.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2006

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