Rock of Ages
Bourbon Room

Some musicals never die, a case in point being Rock of Ages.  It began its theatrical life in a 30-minute version at an L.A. nightclub in 2005. Then it moved to another L.A. nightclub, where a full production was unveiled. Next stop was Vegas, followed by off-Broadway and Broadway, where it proceeded to run for 2000 performances and cop numerous prizes.  Productions were then seen in Canada, England, Australia and South Africa. The capper was a 2012 movie starring Tom Cruise.

Now the cultural phenomenon has returned to L.A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
London Assurance
Irish Repertory Theater

First things first! Before I delve into the Irish Repertory Theater’s marvelous production of London Assurance by Dublin-born playwright Dion Boucicault (1820-1890), which runs through February 9, 2020, I must say that the award-winning Irish Rep is a gift from heaven. Their choices, consistently so, of what to produce, along with the actors they choose to cast, is simply wonderful. And this wonderfulness goes for their use of top-of-the-line set, costume, lighting, sound, and hair and wig designers for each play. Each and every production is a joyous event.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Murder on the Orient Express
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

You won’t see a more elaborate, multi-faceted, multi-media period staged design with breathtaking technical effects than in Asolo Rep’s production of Murder on the Orient Express. No, not even on Broadway. Luckily, everything—even costumes and hair styles—services a well directed and acted dramatic comedy, here rising above a passing adaptation of the celebrated mystery novel.

As uncannily astute mystery solver Hercule Poirot, James DeVita scores. He also gives you a narrative framework for murder and pursuit of the murderer.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Band's Visit, The
Academy of Music

The Band’s Visit is a delicate, intimate show about the power of music, told with an exceptional musical score. The story about an Egyptian band has mostly-Arabic music composed by the half-Lebanese David Yazbek.

It’s the first time this ethnic genre has been heard on Broadway, and I’m happy to see the show on its national tour. The catchy songs are played by the on-stage band which adds an energetic instrumental encore. These melodies make this a must-see event.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Tootsie
Marquis Theater

A thoroughly delightful matinee of the musical Tootsie far and away exceed expectations—particularly the Tony winning lead performance of Santino Fontana. It is intriguing to see him slip from guy to girl and sometimes get trapped and outed in between.

Getting nowhere as the aspiring actor Michael, he is banned and cursed for life by a prominent hack director. Backed by a woman producer, in utter desperation, he lands a role as Tootsie by that very same director.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Broadbend, Arkansas
Duke Theater

This production (in previews when we attended) is spare, with chairs as props. An ensemble of instruments makes it feel like an opera.

Justin Cunningham has an exquisite voice. His tale of working in a nursing home morph into a narrative focused on Dr. Martin Luther King and the Freedom Riders. In the second act Danyel Fulton is featured, resulting in compelling elements yet to be refined and developed.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Height of the Storm, The
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

A West End hit now transferred to Broadway, The Height of the Storm represents a rare opportunity pairing the renowned British actors Jonathan Pryce and Dame Eileen Atkins. Their performances are indeed stunning, but the play by the French playwright, Florian Zeller, translated by Christopher Hampton, is frayed around the edges.

Many questions are raised but unanswered. Some but not all of this is intentional. (Connecting dots and loose ends was the subject of a post-performance talk back.)

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Dublin Carol
Irish Repertory Theater

At the intimate and renowned Irish Repertory Theater, we were enthralled with a taut, emotional three-hander by Connor McPherson.

Under the masterful direction of Ciaran O’Reilly, the drama focused on a tense and troubled alcoholic, John (Jeffrey Bean). The compact design of Charlie Corcoran combines living quarters and the funeral parlor he manages. He took over from the uncle of young Mark (Cillan Hegarty). Just as John had been, the lad is now an apprentice in the business.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Derren Brown: Secret
Cort Theater

One is hard pressed to recall a more entertaining evening of theater.

The British illusionist, Darren Brown, held us spellbound and enthralled. The consistent response was how on earth did he do that? We won’t spoil the impact by revealing or attempting to unravel the tricks. He continued to insist that he has no special or supernatural powers. We are inclined to think otherwise.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Slave Play
John Golden Theater

The controversial and widely discussed radical and confrontational Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris  is a game changer. With his first Broadway production, the playwright is regarded as one of the brightest, most innovative, and outrageous of his generation.

This production is a tsunami of insight, knowledge, rage, and Olympian humor. There are three segments in one two hours-plus act. It is daunting, if not impossible in real time, to unpack all of the ideas and theories that are hurled at us.

Charles Giuliano
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Gruesome Playground Injuries
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Over 30 years calamities and physical injuries bring two people a strong mutual emotional connection. They first meet at age eight in a school nurse’s office, where they begin to explore their hurts.  Similar meetings become a kind of routine along with missed connections between and during them. A set backed by hospital screens is appropriate and functional.

The play is supposed to be a dark comedy but there are only a few comic bits and a dramatic rather than happy ending.  The meeting scenes are not chronological, as in the manner of so many recent plays.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2020
Viaggio
Carousel Lounge, Deck 7

To cite resemblance between this production, Viaggio, and grand Cirque du Soleil productions in large on-land theaters is a hopeful but much-diminished attempt to retain the excellence of the latter on a moving cruise ship. The technical values are high, but the activity and the “actors” are amateurish and unworthy of the price of admission.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Working
Theo Ubique Cabaret Theater

Once upon a time (like, the 1970s), pop music and show music were as dissimilar as Bluegrass and Baroque, making it unsurprising that the songs performed in Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso's musical revue, Working, should lean toward the Broadway tropes of that era.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Young Man from Atlanta, The
Pershing Square Signature Center

Horton Foote’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Young Man from Atlanta, which premiered in 1995 at Signature Theater and was revived on Broadway in 1997, reflects the attitude towards gays of the era of its setting (Houston in 1950). The queer figures are not even on stage (one of them has committed suicide), and they are only important in how they affect straight people.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Inheritance, The
Barrymore Theater

Every generation or so since the late 1960s, a new play encapsulating the gay experience opens in New York. The Boys in the Band, Torch Song Trilogy, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and Angels in America have defined their respective gay moment and how the general society is reacting to it. Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance is the latest theatrical chronicle of the American gay journey. The massive work checks all the right boxes for a certifiable hit.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Bright Room Called Day, A
Public Theater

Despite its excesses and nearly three-hour length, off-Broadway’s Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven is never dull. The same cannot be said for the Public Theater’s revival of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day. This 1985 work was Kushner’s first and definitely shows the sparks of genius later responsible for Angels in America, but it’s also overlong, talky, and still doesn’t entirely work in theatrical terms in spite of revisions by Kushner for this production. (The original Day was workshopped off-off-Broadway in 1985.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

The Healy family of Broadway’s Jagged Little Pill confront a plethora of problems, but they’re having a day at the beach compared to the crowd at Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company. Stephen Adly Guirgis’s new super-sized comedy-drama contains a stageful of characters—the huge cast numbers 18, a rarity for a straight play on or Off-Broadway—each exploding with their own trauma.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Jagged Little Pill
Broadhurst Theater

Jagged Little Pill is a jagged little musical, sometimes smooth, sometimes sharp, sometimes bland and predictable, sometimes edgy and shattering. This raw, uneven tale of modern angst in an upper-class Connecticut family employs Alanis Morisette’s groundbreaking 1995 album for its score. Tom Kitt did the skillful arrangements and orchestrations, combining Broadway smoothness with Morisette’s signature prickly texture.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Sing Street
New York Theater Workshop

Set in economically and emotionally depressed 1980s Dublin, Sing Street’s characters seek to alleviate their sorrow through musical means. Derived from the 2016 film, the new tuner employs tropes parallel to the Tony-winning musical Once, which was also based on a movie and began life at New York Theater Workshop. In addition, both shows have the same book writer (Enda Walsh), and John Carney, who wrote the “Sing Street” original screenplay and collaborated on the score with Gary Clark, also wrote and directed the “Once” screen version.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Greater Clements
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Samuel D. Hunter continues to document the disenfranchised of his home state Idaho in Greater Clements at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. As he did in such works as Lewiston/Clarkston, Pocatello, and A Bright New Boise, Hunter feelingly chronicles average Americans coping with tragedy as best they can. (Other recent playwrights to offer similar assessments of our current class struggle include Lynn Nottage with Sweat and David Lindsay-Abaire with Good People.)

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Thin Place, The
Playwrights Horizons

Hot new playwright Lucas Hnath takes a great risk by naming his latest play The Thin Place. Its plot and premise could be taken as gossamer light, and critics could easily take cheap shots employing the skinny title as emblematic of the work itself. But this haunting ghost story—pardon the pun—contains an unsettling power, enhanced by the subtle work of director Les Waters and an expert cast.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Great Scrooge Disaster, The
Off the Wall Theater

Here’s a show that would appeal to anyone who secretly wishes that lumps of coal would show up in someone else’s stocking: Off the Wall’s The Great Scrooge Disaster, a spoof of all things related to the holiday classic, A Christmas Carol.

In this version, everything that could possibly go wrong in the theater becomes the focus of this wacky, hilarious show. At the outset, this cast attempts to stage a standard version of the Charles Dickens’ classic. However, it takes only a moment before the wrapping starts to come off this absurdly funny gift.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Christmas Foundling, The
Buena Pride Arts Center

It takes a village to raise a child, even when the village is a mining camp in the Sierras during the California gold rush of 1850. That’s where a lone outcast woman finds shelter with a pair of prospectors, only hours before giving birth to a son and dying in the effort. Though wholly ignorant of parenting skills, the men vow to care for the orphan, whose presence soon transforms the band of bachelors into a fellowship united in fraternal loyalty and affection.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Bad Habits
Ruskin Theater

Who knew?  Who knew that Catholic nuns and bishops could crack wise about the church, tell dirty jokes, sing bawdy songs, and sneak drinks of whiskey?

Maybe these things don’t happen in real life, but they sure as hell do in Bad Habits, Steve Mazur’s new play, which is now a holiday attraction at the Ruskin. As directed by Mike Reilly, Bad Habits (pun intended) mostly takes place in the convent of the Sisters of St.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven
Atlantic Theater Company - Linda Gross Theater

Enough stories pour out of the powerful, humane Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven” to keep a TV series filled for a year. Stephen Adly Guirgis’s naturalistic play is akin to such works as John Arden’s Live Like Pigs and Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths. It creates a world unto itself, a New York women’s shelter teeming with love and lust, drugs and booze, the battered and the neglected, parolees and a priest – and an unfortunate goat.

If you’re looking for a well-made play, this ain’t it.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Holiday Radio Show: 1944, The
Berger Park Coach House

In 2017, the playwrights of the Three Cat "Artists Incubator" collaborated on a holiday show replicating a live radio broadcast in 1942, replete with music of the period, messages to troops stationed overseas and tributes to the patriotic "Home Front" volunteers.

When this idea proved successful, Three Cat returned the following year with another faux-radio program, this one set in 1943, composed of newly collected material reflecting a society struggling against despair during a bleak chapter in our history.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Mandy Patinkin: Diaries
Verizon Hall

Mandy Patinkin began a 30-city national tour in Philadelphia on October 30. It was a program of songs on somber topics. This was unlike the many concerts in Patinkin’s earlier days which, mostly, were love fests of romantic songs. I have greatly admired Mandy in numerous Broadway roles and in concerts, but this outing left me depressed.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Burning Bluebeard
Ruth Page Center for the Arts

Have you ever been caught in a theater during a fire?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Handle with Care
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Theater

From the title, one wouldn’t guess that Handle with Care is a bilingual, bicultural romantic comedy which can work as a Jewish holidays celebration.  That it takes place at Christmastime is basically irrelevant, though snowy weather outside a Goodview, VA motel room sets time and atmosphere nicely.

Why is Ayelet, a young Israeli traveling with her grandmother, railing in Hebrew at inept delivery man Terrence?

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Little Black Dress
Kirk Douglas Theater

It’s a musical about girls, written by girls, for girls.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
First Deep Breath, The
The Biograph

Don't begrudge Lee Edward Colston II his play's running time—three acts of one hour. each separated by an intermission. As August: Osage County recently demonstrated, some stories require extensive time and space to be told fully, and Colston is nothing if not thorough in his effort to ensure that all questions are answered and all arguments explored before we decide what path our author means us to follow.

In the first 10 minutes, we are informed by the Rev.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
Decembrer 2019
Inheritance, The
Ethel Barrymore Theater

In Matthew Lopez’s two-part, six-and-a-half hour funny, moving, sensuous, literate, but digressive epic, The Inheritance, tangible meets intangible. The title has a double meaning -- inheriting property and inheriting history—leading to the admonishment that the halves should “only connect.”

That last wish comes directly from E. M. Forster’s novel, “Howards End,” on which “The Inheritance” riffs. The novel’s title refers to a house with a history, a house to be inherited from an older man by a younger one.

David A. Rosenberg
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Band's Visit, The
Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

One of the most-anticipated touring musicals to visit Milwaukee, The Band’s Visit, also turned out to be the most disappointing. Expectations were high for this much-awarded (10 Tonys!) musical and its offbeat story of an Egyptian Police Band. But the large Marcus Center for the Performing Arts proved to be too cavernous for this intimate, small-scale musical that never got off the ground except when the entire band is playing its instruments.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Tall Boy, The
Stage 773

The absence of familiar faces—even for a moment—is enough to trigger extreme anxiety, tears, or outright terror in infants.

If left unaddressed, a child then grows to mistrust the comfort provided by empathetic relationships, lest they prove likewise temporary. Now, consider the trauma suffered by sons and daughters confronting the destruction of their homes, the murder of their families, the loss of their identity—indeed, their entire existence, rendered subject to the whims of alien wardens.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Christmas Carol, A
The Wallis: Lovelace Studio Theater

David Mynne works his theatrical magic again in A Christmas Carol, his one-man show now running at The Wallis.  Mynne, founding member of the British company Kneehigh, has had much success with his previous solo shows, Great Expectations, Dracula and The Odyssey.  Now he has expanded his range with his adaptation of the Dickens classic in which he plays dozens of characters, beginning with Ebenezer Scrooge.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
December 2019
Cyrano
Daryl Roth Theater

Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is another cherished role often attempted by top stars. Like the CSC’s current Macbeth, the New Group’s musical version of the classic romance of the large-nosed poet-swordsman and his frustrated love for the beautiful Roxanne, is mildly entertaining but passionless. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Macbeth
Classic Stage Company

A trio of the most iconic and sought-after male title roles in world theater are currently being tackled Off-Broadway in a variety of productions ranging from wickedly sublime (DruidShakespeare’s Richard III) to well-intentioned but wrongheaded. Macbeth is regarded as just as juicy a role as Richard and even more complex, since he transforms from a fairly decent sort into a tyrannous monster, set on either by his own demons or the supernatural forces represented by the three witches, depending on your interpretation.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
DruidShakespeare: Richard III
Gerald W. Lynch Theater

A trio of the most iconic and sought-after male title roles in world theater are currently being tackled Off-Broadway in a variety of productions ranging from wickedly sublime to well-intentioned but wrongheaded. On top is the Irish company DruidShakespeare setting the Bard’s Richard III.

Presented as part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, this Richard III is a howlingly funny horror show presided over by a Joker-ish, sexy usurper played with giggling menace by Aaron Monaghan.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Key Largo
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

The set is better than the play.

John Lee Beatty’s design for Key Largo, the revamped version of Maxwell Anderson’s 1946 drama now running at the Geffen, is a thing of beauty.  With its looming walls, big staircase, and seedy, weather-beaten look, it creates the perfect atmosphere for the story that unfolds in the lobby of a cheap hotel in the Florida Keys. The tourists who frequented the hotel, most of whom came down from the north to sport-fish for marlin, are long gone.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
November 2019
Lion in Winter, The
freeFall Theater

Filling the central aisle, viewed by an audience on each side, action is continuous and vigorous in freeFall’s production of The Lion in Winter. It fully exposes the dysfunctionality of the Plantagenet Family of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.  And of the precarious state of 12th century relations between Britain and France.

Joe D.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2019

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