Peter Pan Goes Wrong
Ethel Barrymore Theater

“Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” So spoke actor Edmond Gwenn at the end of his life. No further proof is needed than Peter Pan Goes Wrong. The actors run up and down the aisles yelling before the play begins. Then, they run around the stage yelling their lines as they perform slapsticks to the shrieking delight of the audience.

Before the play even begins, the set gives away what’s to follow. It’s decidedly wonky, with broad pink stripes, a triple bunkbed, a huge trunk, and bowling pins far stage left.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Summer, 1976
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

David Auburn’s Summer, 1976 is not exactly shattering but does offer amazing actors Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht a chance to display their incomparable skills in bringing two keenly observed women to life on stage. Auburn’s two-hander produced by Manhattan Theater Club chronicles the friendship of Diana (Linney) and Alice (Hecht) which lasts for a few weeks during the titular season at an Ohio university. Diana is an art teacher and Alice is the wife of an economics professor.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Prima Facie
John Golden Theater

Handing in one of the acting highlights of this or any other Broadway season is Jodie Comer in Suzie Miller’s explosive solo play Prima Facie, at the Golden Theater after an Olivier-winning run in London. Comer runs the proverbial gamut of emotions from A to way beyond Z as Tessa, a high-powered British barrister who mostly represents criminal defendants accused of sexual assault. The tables are turned when Tessa herself is the victim of an attack by a fellow lawyer and she must undergo the degrading process of seeking justice in a male-dominated court system.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Hadestown
Marcus Performing Arts Center

When this critic first saw Hadestown on Broadway (with fellow UW-Madison alum André de Shields in the key role of Hermès), it didn’t seem like a show with a broad-enough appeal to tour. But what do I know? Hadestown won 8 Tony Awards and became a sensation that still draws crowds of nearly 100% of capacity on Broadway.

It seems as though the ancient Greek love story between simple Orpheus and strong-minded Eurydice resonates with audiences everywhere. The national tour that played in Milwaukee recently had its final performance on May 7.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Good Night, Oscar
Belasco Theater

The 2022-23 Broadway season ends with a trio of productions--Prima Facie, Summer 1976, and Good Night, Oscar--featuring dazzling star-level performances. Sean Hayes delivers one of the most powerful and versatile turns in a straight Broadway play in many seasons in Doug Wright’s somewhat flawed, but ultimately absorbing and entertaining play, Good Night, Oscar, now at the Belasco after a run at Chicago’s Goodman Theater.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
White Girl in Danger
Tony Kiser Theater

Throwing in just about everything including the kitchen sink in its examination of how African-American characters are marginalized in mass media, White Girl in Danger, Michael R. Jackson’s riotous follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Strange Loop, is a piercingly satiric send-up of soap operas—with more stories than the Freedom Tower. We’re inside a TV drama universe ruled over by the Great White Writer.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
May 2023
Sweeney Todd
Lunt-Fontanne Theater

I am now a confirmed, dyed-in-the-wool Grobanite. How anyone can experience the current production of Sweeney Todd and not be totally blown away by the performance of Josh Groban is beyond me. This is not, as advertised, “a musical,” but rather, an opera, with Groban’s clear baritone voice (some style him as a tenor) ringing out through the theater.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Parade
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater

Perhaps the most powerful moment in Parade, the stunning revival of Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s 1998 musical about the infamous Leo Frank case, is a silent one. Ben Platt, who gives a stirring performance as Frank, a man falsely accused of murdering a young girl, sits silently high up on Dane Laffrey’s evocative set, lit by Heather Gilbert to suggest a jail cell. Platt remains seated at a simple table throughout the intermission with a look of desperation on his face.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Good Night, Oscar
Belasco Theater

Who would have thought? Super adorable Jack McFarland of “Will & Grace,” who had all of us convulsed with laughter because of his inimitable comic timing, would star onstage and blow us all away with his brilliant performance as witty, neurotic Oscar Levant? Would we even know that this is Sean Hayes? Who would have thought that he’d have the audience transfixed by playing “Rhapsody in Blue” on the piano, and that he’d have a roaring standing ovation?

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Dancin'

(see review(s) under BOB FOSSE'S DANCIN'

Bob Fosse's Dancin'
Music Box Theater

It’s the casual, seemingly unobserved movements that makes the spectacular revival of Bob Fosse’s 1978 revue Dancin’ so special. Yes, there are thrilling feats of terpsichory with backflips, leaps, jetes, and extensions all over Robert Brill’s set of moving, towering scaffolds, but there are just as many small, intimate gestures that sent a thrill up my spine.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Sweeney Todd
Lunt-Fontanne Theater

At the 1988 Tony Awards, the big battle was between shows composed by the two respective behemoths of the American and British musical theater: Stephen Sondheim’s twist on fairy tales, Into the Woods, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s take on a horror classic, Phantom of the Opera. Despite winning Best Book for James Lapine and Best Score for Sondheim, Woods lost the Best Musical prize to Lloyd Webber’s more popular Phantom, which is finally closing soon after a 35-year run.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Bad Cinderella
Imperial Theater

At the 1988 Tony Awards, the big battle was between shows composed by the two respective behemoths of the American and British musical theater: Stephen Sondheim’s twist on fairy tales, Into the Woods, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s take on a horror classic, Phantom of the Opera. Despite winning Best Book for James Lapine and Best Score for Sondheim, Woods  lost the Best Musical prize to Lloyd Webber’s more popular Phantom, which is finally closing soon after a 35-year run.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Coast Starlight, The
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Theater is the ultimate medium of the imagination, more so than film or TV. With the latter two, there is the potential to travel literally anywhere in the world (or the universe in fact), but the audience must work their minds to transform the four corners of the stage into the four corners of the earth. The stage provides more magical experiences than the ones offered before the large or small screens since you are a collaborator on making the trip and not just a viewer looking through the cinema camera lens.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Life of Pi
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater

Theater is the ultimate medium of the imagination, more so than film or TV. With the latter two, there is the potential to travel literally anywhere in the world (or the universe in fact), but the audience must work their minds to transform the four corners of the stage into the four corners of the earth. The stage provides more magical experiences than the ones offered before the large or small screens since you are a collaborator on making the trip and not just a viewer looking through the cinema camera lens.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Camelot
Lincoln Center - Vivian Beaumont Theater

Camelot, the musical adaptation of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, has always been a “problem” show. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s lush, romantic score which includes such evergreen standards as “If Ever I Would Leave You,” “How to Handle a Woman,” and the optimistic title tribute to an idealized socially just society, has been overshadowed by Lerner’s confusing and diffuse book.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Peter Pan Goes Wrong
Ethel Barrymore Theater

For just plain endless belly laughs, give yourself a treat and take in Peter Pan Goes Wrong from a theater company just called Mischief at the Ethel Barrymore. This follow-up to Mischief’s The Play That Goes Wrong which had a long run on Broadway from 2017 to 2019 and is still playing Off-Broadway at New World Stages, follows the same basic template. An incompetent amateur troupe of British loonies mounts a familiar classic (in this case J.M. Barrie’s fantasy of the boy who wouldn’t grow up), and everything that can go wrong, does.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Thanksgiving Play, The
Helen Hayes Theater

Larissa FastHorse satirizes current confusing attitudes in modern theater in her riotous comedy, The Thanksgiving Play, now presented by Second Stage at the Hayes Theater after an Off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons in 2018. Fasthorse, the first Native American female playwright to be produced on Broadway, mercilessly mocks the well-meaning but condescending attempts of good-hearted liberals to include the voices of oppressed minorities in the arts.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Big Sexy
Donnelly Theater

Three things grace Westcoast Black Theater Troupe’s stage: the music of Fats Waller, a tribute to his embodiment but also performer Leon Pitts himself, and WBTT’s live band (previously playing from backstage). These constitute a triple treat for audiences who fill all seats in WBTT’s Creator and Director Nate Jacobs’s “dream come true” venue. They frequently applaud his Tribute to Waller but also his past and  present portrayer Leon S. Pitts.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Sunset Boulevard
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

One of Milwaukee’s newest theater companies, Bombshell, enters another phase with the company’s recent move to the intimate Studio Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center. The small theater, home to Milwaukee Chamber Theatre and other local companies, is a big step up for Bombshell in terms of technical design and seating.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Visit Joe Whitefeather
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

Beaver Gap, 1970s, badly needed economic growth, so its Council decided to rename the town to attract more tourists and add to its residents. Consumeristic choice: adopt WWII Native American military hero’s name and put his body in a big memorial that can attract visitors. Good or bad move?  Visit Joe Whitefeather has the community development story being televised now, an interview with a prominent early participant in it.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Love's Labour's Lost
Ringling Bayshore Garden

Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of Shakespeare’s early comedies, is not as often produced as others, due probably to its many allusions to now obscure people of the times and its types of witty rhetoric and linguistics. For FSU/Asolo Conservatory presentation, director Jonathan Epstein has adapted the play into a modern, almost musical-comedy. In it, a mix of aristocratic and lower-tier characters sing, dance and cavort in a lush garden setting to bring to life a comic strip. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Bob Fosse's Dancin'
Music Box Theater

There’s no other way to put it. You’ve got to really love dancing to enjoy this show. Even so, after a while Dancin’ begins to feel disjointed, repetitive, tedious. All the Fosse trademarks are there: the famous “jazz hands,” straw hats, hip thrusts, cigarettes, and even the voiceover is Fosse. The best bits tend to be short, especially the number with extreme tumbling, with a little boxing thrown in.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
Paralyzed
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

Long postponed by the Pandemic, Paralyzed keeps its two characters’  meeting also delayed. Yet Lee and Leigh are importantly related from youth through middle age. Playwright Etan Frankel deals with their progress by having each act it out individually in tandem. Their mainly oral interpretative parts lead, under Meg Gilbert’s vigorous direction, to a very satisfying traditional dramatic climax. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2023
The Best We Could (A Family Tragedy)
City Center - Stage 1

Emily Feldman’s The Best We Could (a family tragedy), at Manhattan Theater Club’s Off-Broadway City Center Stage I, is performed on a bare stage and delivers an emotional wallop despite its spareness. Feldman’s telling of her story of a father-daughter road trip is influenced by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with a Stage Manager narrating the action, playing supporting parts, and acting as God-like figure controlling the characters.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Seagull/Woodstock, NY, The
Pershing Square Signature Center

Most updated adaptations of classic theater works deliver few fresh ideas or interpretations and usually elicit the response, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just present the original and have done with it.” But two current variations on oft-produced pieces prove the exception to this rule. Both Broadway’s & Juliet and The Seagull: Woodstock, NY, presented by the New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center, offer new insights for contemporary audiences without tearing down their source material.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Doll's House, A
Hudson Theater

Before Jamie Lloyd’s minimalist and strangely powerful revival of A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s prophetic proto-feminist masterpiece, begins, audience members at the Hudson Theater are treated to the spectacle of Oscar-winning Jessica Chastain sitting in a simple chair on a revolving turntable. As Chastain is spun slowly around, she fixes the audience with a cold stare. Many whip out their camera-phones to take videos or pictures, as if she were an art exhibit. This pre-show photo op reinforces Ibsen’s theme of society treating women like dolls or objects.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Noises Off
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

Readers who have seen and enjoyed the hilarious 2012 comedy, The Play That Goes Wrong can tip their hat to another play that opened about 40 years ago, Noises Off by Michael Frayn. In both works, done in the play-within-a-play format, actors must contend with missing props, falling set pieces, actors’ physical missteps, inaccurate line readings, and so forth.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
& Juliet
Stephen Sondheim Theater

Most updated adaptations of classic theater works deliver few fresh ideas or interpretations and usually elicit the response, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just present the original and have done with it.” But & Juliet, on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theater after a smash run in London, offers new insights for contemporary audiences without tearing down its source material.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Pictures from Home
Studio 54

Pictures from Home currently running thru April 30 is the most delightful and thought-provoking play currently gracing the Broadway stages at this very moment.

Featuring the tried-and-true Danny Burstein, Nathan Lane, and Zoë Wanamaker - three stellar actors at their very best – the play is wowing audiences with loads of laughter, wisps of tears, and nostalgia to boot, for one hour and forty-five intermissionless minutes. As to be expected, with such accomplished illuminati, be prepared to add a 7-minute tsunami of uproariously well-deserved curtain bows.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

In what she deems a memory play, narrator Linda O’Shea tells the audience of four 1970s days when an Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish shook up her entire  Irish Catholic family.  Her narration gets frequently interrupted and briefly taken over by family members and visitors. All this activity occurs in two acts in the family’s common rooms to be like the era’s typical TV show episodes and with similar characterizations, jokes, and comic effects.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
We Will not be Silent
St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

Acacia Theater, Milwaukee’s Christian-based theater company, presents a powerful and intense drama, We Will Not Be Silent, in the intimate downstairs performing space at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in River Hills.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
SpongeBob Musical, for Young Audiences, The
First Stage

Family-friendly First Stage, one of the country’s leading theaters for young audiences, continues its current season with a scaled-down production of the 2017 musical, SpongeBob SquarePants, the Broadway Musical .

Now it’s time for The SpongeBob Musical for Young Audiences, which opened at Milwaukee’s First Stage theater on March 3. Both the Broadway show and its younger version are affiliated with the Nickelodeon TV network, which produces the popular cartoon version.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2023
Cornelia Street
Atlantic Theater - Studio

Two new Off-Broadway productions on the smaller stages of two major theater companies have large ambitions but offer only tired tropes we’ve seen too many times before: the Roundabout’s The Wanderers and Simon Stephens and Mark Eitzel’s musical Cornelia Street, about a struggling Greenwich Village eatery. The latter piece, at Atlantic Theater Company’s basement studio space, wants to be hip and compassionate but winds up serving us a warmed-over, unsatisfying meal.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Wanderers, The
Roundabout - Laura Pels Theater

Two new Off-Broadway productions on the smaller stages of two major theater companies have large ambitions but offer only tired tropes we’ve seen too many times before: the musical Cornelia Street and Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers at Roundabout Theater Company’s Laura Pels stage. The latter does have a modicum of genuine emotion and insight, but too much of the plot, acting, and direction are stagey and stilted.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Dreamgirls
West Coast Black Theater Troupe - Donnelly Theater

A simple story set to music with much dancing and other movement becomes an extravaganza in Dreamgirls at Westcoast Black Theater Troupe. It has gone all out technically to present this show, even by employing renowned Asolo Rep Scenic Studios to construct the colorful scenery.  Along with WBTT’s usual sumptuous costuming, designed by Darci Collins, the musical drama couldn’t look any better nor could its cast. And all the sound matches the sight.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Last Match, The
Florida Studio Theater - Bowne's Lab

The Last Match is about more than a semifinal in a career-determining contest. It’s also personally important for its opposing male tennis players. Playwright Anna Ziegler also ensures that the women in their lives completely share in their achievements. Kate Alexander, an eminent director of women but well versed in motivating male actors too, astutely shows how intimate ties to women can work when the men are prominent sports figures.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Inspector Calls, An
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

A night of a successful businessman’s family and a prospective son-in-law celebrating becomes a nightmare of revelations when an Inspector comes with news and questions about a woman’s ghastly suicide. Could the English aristocrats have been involved? If so, how? FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s revival of J. B. Priestley’s early 20th century classic supplies answers within an Edwardian atmosphere. It presents Priestly’s humane socialist philosophy vs. the characters’ greed, self-indulgence, and moralistic vacancy.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Some Like it Hot
Shubert Theater

The new musical version of Some Like It Hot, based on Billy Wilder’s 1959 comic film classic about two musicians disguised in drag, is a delightfully daffy romp, so silly and fun-making that its sometimes heavy-handed political messaging doesn’t get in the way of a Broadway good time. Set in during the depths of the Depression in 1933, this Hot follows the basic outline of Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s original screenplay but makes more than a few significant detours into “woke” territory.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2023
Reel Music
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Music and movies go together as four singer-dancers summon up memories of favorite viewings and accompanying tunes from silent to recent film classics. By starting with “Hurray for Hollywood” and “That’s Entertainment”, the group previews the script’s organization of songs from earliest films through each decade until the present. So there’s at least some tune for every body of every age in the audience to recall and love, as it will an era’s chief events.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2023

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