Sons of Hollywood
Windy City Playhouse

If you google video clips of the seminal 1925 film “Ben-Hur,” you already know Ramon Novarro was every bit as hot as his publicity claimed, and if you've read the tell-all book “Hollywood Babylon,” you already know the tabloid gossip surrounding his unseemly death. If you're wise to the making of sausage and movies, however, you also know that there's a broken heart for every carefully cultivated palm tree on Sunset Boulevard.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Lehman Trilogy, The
Ahmanson Theater

The Lehman Trilogy is a portrait of a rich, powerful Jewish family that put its stamp on New York for several generations. It is also a capitalist fable, an examination of the American Dream, a tragedy of epic proportions… and an inspired piece of theater.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
My Way
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

It has been 24 years since crooner Frank Sinatra passed from this Earth. During his heyday, he rarely strayed from gossip columns, headlines, and microphones. And now his music lives on. The Milwaukee Repertory Theater pays loving tribute to Sinatra’s life in My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra .

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Intimate Apparel
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Intimate Apparel is the story of Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown), an African American who has come to New York City hoping to find more job opportunities and a better life for herself. She loves her work, sewing beautiful underclothing for upscale women. But her personal life is a disaster. She's in her late 30's and has no husband, no children, and no prospects. The one male with whom she has formed a bond is strictly forbidden fruit. He's Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Gels), the orthodox Jew who sells Esther her fabrics.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
Plaza Suite
Hudson Theater

Two new Broadway productions offer boatloads of entertainment but skirt around serious examination of their subjects. That’s perfectly okay; neither Plaza Suite, Neil Simon’s 1968 trio of comic one-acts set in the titular hotel, nor MJ, the jukebox-bio musical of Michael Jackson, are meant to be anything more than a lighthearted night out. Yet both hint ever so slightly at the darker issues lurking just beneath their jolly surfaces. 

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
March 2022
As You Like It
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Quadracci Powerhouse

Poor Shakespeare. Contemporary theater companies will never leave his work alone. One cannot count the number of “timely” updates to his 400-year-old plays over the years. Now Milwaukee Repertory Theater gives us an As You Like It that’s all dolled up in the groovy, psychedelic 1960s. Furthermore, a great deal of the story is now told in song, with more than 20 Beatles tunes added to spice things up.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, The
Goodman Theater

When Mary Zimmerman's athletic-acrobatic-abstract exhibition made its debut in 1993, nobody knew what to make of an evening of kinetic display allegedly based on the aesthetic, scientific, and metaphysical precepts/contemplations of the Renaissance Man who defined the term. Was this multi-disciplinary mosaic to be viewed as dance, accompanied by words instead of music à la Martha Graham? Was it an "acting-out" game (Simon says "light reflects off solid objects")? Were we supposed to focus on the dazzling gymnastics or the explanations of their purpose?

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
On the Other Hand, We're Happy
Matrix Theater

On the Other Hand, We’re Happy was written by the Welsh playwright Daf James and first made a splash at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  Now Rogue Machine has mounted the American premiere of the play and we are all the better for it.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Gem of the Ocean
Goodman Theater

The theater playbill for Gem of the Ocean informs us that our setting is the industrial outskirts of Pittsburgh in 1904, where street talk hints at labor tensions in the nearby steel mills, recently rendered volatile by the suicide of a factory worker accused of stealing a bucket of nails.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Relentless
Theater Wit

The scholarly history of African immigrants in North America is all too often restricted to the topics of slavery (abolished by white men in 1863) and civil-rights unrest (attendant on anti-war protests in the 1960s)—myopic views reinforcing popular stereotypes of a rootless minority awaiting rescue by their betters. The lingering prevalence of this narrow focus is why every minute of Tyla Abercrumbie's long-anticipated play, Relentless, arrives accompanied by tacit fanfares heralding its divergence from the same shopworn narratives.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Black No More
Pershing Square Signature Center

The African-American experience in different decades of the 20th Century is explored with ingenuity and passion in two new Off-Broadway musicals. Both feature eclectic and captivating scores, but whereas the operatic Intimate Apparel succeeds in telling a relatable story, Black No More, produced by The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center, pushes too hard to make its valid points. A rap-hip-hop stage adaptation of George S. Schuyler’s 1931 satiric novel, Black No More imagines a machine that transforms black people into whites.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Music Man, The
Winter Garden Theater

The question on every theater fan’s mind for two years has been: Will the highly anticipated revival of The Music Man, Meredith Willson’s beloved 1957 tribute to chicanery, Americana, and apple pie, be worth all the hype? The production, helmed by the magic-touch showman Jerry Zaks (the Bette Midler Hello, Dolly!) and starring two of Broadway’s most charismatic, Tony-winning stars, Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, was slated to open just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down theaters around the world.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Learned Ladies, The
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

For the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Western World’s foremost author of dramatic comedy, FSU/Asolo Conservatory not only provides a verse-filled comedic treat but a visual one, as well. The Learned Ladies of Moliere’s play exemplify both as they act to dominate family and anyone who’d join or even serve them. Since learning, especially use of language, is their weapon, isn’t it fitting that Moliere’s French alexandrines be well translated to English iambic pentameter lines that their antagonists won’t be able to use against them? Or will they? 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
It's Alive, IT'S ALIVE!
Odyssey Theater

The outrageous performance artist, John Fleck, is back with another stage piece of his, It’s Alive, IT’S ALIVE!. The show is raising hell at the Odyssey for a month-long run, directed by Fleck’s longtime collaborator, David Schweizer.  Fleck is joined onstage by two supporting actors, Kyle G. Fuller and Tomoko Karina, and a musical duo, John Snow (bass) and Scott Roberts (keyboard). Together these partners in theatrical crime poke fun at a slew of targets: The Virus, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, Trump, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and much, much more.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Detained
Fountain Theater

Immigration detention, the shame of America, is the subject of Detained the brave and shocking docudrama which is in a world-premiere run at the Fountain Theater.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The
Museum of Jewish Heritage - Edmond J. Safra Hall

Despite countless closings, postponements, cancellations, empty seats, Covid interventions, and the annoying requirement of having to wear a mask, present proof of a vaccination with a valid government issued photo ID, and go through a security check, even before you enter the theater, New York City’s theater scene appears to be chugging along, surprisingly so, with an abundance of better-than-usual fare.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Power of Sail
Geffen Playhouse - Gil Cates Theater

Harvard professor Charles Nichols (the estimable Bryan Cranston) opens a can of worms when he invites a notorious white nationalist to speak at an annual lecture series. Nichols, a firm believer in the 1st Amendment, thinks that everyone has a right to speak his mind, even if he’s a racist and an anti-Semite.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Laughing Matters (Variant 6)
Florida Studio Theater - Court Cabaret

Newest edition of Florida Studio Theatre’s musical, comedic Laughing Matters highlights Pandemic-induced Paranoia regarding political and cultural issues. Local to national, they include boisterous responses to mandates and various means of distancing from physical problems. In song and sketches, Sarasota and Florida issues like over-development get skewered along with national ones like pollution and inflation. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Slave Play
Mark Taper Forum

Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play was written six years ago when the African-American playwright was a student at Yale. His play, which deals with race and sexuality in the USA, is very much a young man’s work, packed with scatological humor, wild experimentation and provocative ideas. Thanks to its boldness and power, the play was produced off-Broadway (by New York Theatre Workshop) when Harris was still a student.  It then went to Broadway in 2019 and received twelve Tony nominations , sparking controversy the whole time.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Music Man, The
Winter Garden Theater

How amazing do you have to be to make Sutton Foster slip into the background? Just as good as Hugh Jackman. It's not a fair contest. Jackman is so magnetic that when he's onstage, you don't notice anyone else. And when he's not, you wish for him to come back. That smile alone is so totally irresistible. No wonder people are mesmerized by this Harold Hill.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Play That Goes Wrong, The
Florida Studio Theater - Gompertz

In The Play that Goes Wrong, there are actually two plays that do so. One is an English mystery about a 20th century murder at a fictional Haversham Manor  The  other is the mystery play’s presentation by The West Palmetto Drama Society.  What goes absolutely right is Florida Studio Theater’s production of both, in which everybody and everything that goes wrong come off to hilarious perfection. 

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Skeleton Crew
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

It's hard to imagine drinking coffee, changing clothes, or having a serious conversation in the break room at this factory. But in this one set show, that's where the action is.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Great Leap, The
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

As part of the years China took The Great Leap to be an International leader, 1958 up to 1989, China invited and hosted Americans in sports exhibition games against its top players. Lauren Yee’s play, The Great Leap, features a school basketball team from San Francisco in such a competition in 1989. The piece focuses, though, on both competitors’ coaches and particularly a seemingly unlikely U.S. player of Chinese descent. So doing, it reveals not only personal histories but links up with major political ones that span decades.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Prayer for the French Republic
City Center - Stage 1

 “It’s the suitcase or the coffin,” bluntly explains a character in Prayer for the French Republic, Joshua Harmon’s somewhat overlong, but ultimately moving drama ostensibly about one family of French Jews, but it’s really about the state of European and all Jewry. The man uttering the unvarnished, but pragmatic assessment of what it means to be a Jew is Charles Benhamou (solid Jeff Seymour), a father and husband contemplating moving his family from a comfortable, upper-middle-class existence in Paris to an unknown situation in Israel.

Dave Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Long Day's Journey into Night
Minetta Lane Theater

Transposing classic plays into modern eras has been an accepted theatrical technique for quite a while now. Moving these timeless works into a contemporary setting can illuminate their universal themes and bring insight to current issues. But these time-warp productions have mostly been for Shakespearean texts. Few more recent classics have switched time frames, probably because we are too familiar with their original settings to accept any updating.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
MJ
Neil Simon Theater

Even before MJ begins, the excitement in the air is palpable. Some people who don't like Michael Jackson, for one reason or another, but none of them are in the audience.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Intimate Apparel
Lincoln Center - Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

The African-American experience in different decades of the 20th Century is explored with ingenuity and passion in two new Off-Broadway musicals. Both feature eclectic and captivating scores, but unlike the overly obvious Black no More, Intimate Apparel, at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, succeeds in telling its relatable story to become an integrated and powerful piece.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Hang, The
HERE

Taylor Mac is an award-winning playwright-performer whose works seen on, Off, and Off-Off-Broadway question not only gender norms but also conventional dramatic structure. His bizarre musical entertainment The Hang  eschews traditional elements such as story and character to focus on a celebration of queerness in a free-form spectacle which is part party, part philosophical debate, and part funeral rite.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
English
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

Our relationship with language is the subject of Sanaz Toossi’s perceptive new play English, presented in a taut and affecting production by Knud Adams in a co-production from Atlantic Theater Company and Roundabout Theater Company. It’s so refreshing to hear from a new voice and gain perspective outside the American kitchen sink.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
February 2022
Singing Revolution
Broadwater Theater

Singing Revolution: The Musical arrives just in time to lift us up out of our pandemic funk with a blast of joy and hope.

The show tells the unusual story of Estonia’s 1987 song-filled, peaceful uprising against communist Russia. The tiny country stood up to its occupiers by protesting in a non-violent way, using the power of song to help achieve its goals of freedom and democracy. The tale has been turned into a big, brash American musical by Tony Spinosa and James Bearhart, and it’s just what we need to cheer us up in these parlous times.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Mala
Broadway Theater Center - Studio Theater

In the real world, caregivers do not get trophies or medals for their often heroic, physically-exhausting and emotionally-draining work. Nonetheless, caregiving is often part of adult life. It may not be something one looks forward to, but it must be dealt with, all the same.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Antonio's Song
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Studio

It has been a long, winding pandemic journey for the exquisitely crafted and performed Antonio’s Song/I was Dreaming of a Son, which opened recently in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s intimate Stiemke Studio. According to Artistic Director Mark Clements, who directs this piece, this co-production between the Rep and Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) was originally scheduled to open at the Rep in March 2020.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
How and the Why, The
Beverly Hills Playhouse

The How and the Why is a menstruation drama.  More correctly, a mother-and-daughter menstruation drama.

Sarah Treem’s play, now running at the Beverly Hills Playhouse (after several productions back East) is a two-hander about Rachel Hardman, a 28-year-old evolutionary biologist who was given up for adoption at birth .

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Grand Horizons
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

Deciding to follow the “Live Your Best Life” motto of their Florida senior retirement complex, Nancy tells Bill she wants to end their marriage of 50 years. Thus begins what was once called a “matinee comedy.” Frequented mid-day by mainly women theater-goers, it had more risqué dialogue, jokes, and situations than film decency codes permitted. Bess Wohl’s version, Grand Horizons, holds its own in competition with films today by starring older, usually more restrained people—like its audience at Sarasota’s Asolo Rep.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Funny Girl
Sunset Playhouse - Eichmann Studio Theater

Milwaukee’s newest theater company, Bombshell Theater Co., makes an impressive debut with the 1960s musical Funny Girl. The polished production shows a lot of heart and looks amazing, with a seemingly limitless supply of costumes and wigs for its 17 cast members.

A bit of background: Funny Girl is the autobiographical tale of real-life vaudeville star Fanny Brice. It will always be known as the Broadway musical that made singer/director/producer Barbra Streisand a star. Streisand also won an Academy Award for her repeat performance in the 1968 film.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Our Town
Florida State University for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

It’s seldom that a director follows well an author’s stage directions as closely as Desdemona Chiang follows Thornton Wilder’s now-classic ones. What the Asolo Rep production differs from is the stylistically realistic movie version of Our Town,.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Skeleton Crew
Samuel J. Friedman Theater

When patrons enter the Samuel J. Friedman Theater for Manhattan Theater Club’s Broadway premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, they are greeted with prominent signage as part of Michael Carnahan’s ultra-realistic industrial set. The paper admonishments and placards to abide by the theater’s COVID safety protocols blend in with the play’s written rules for the characters to refrain from smoking and gambling and to keep the break room clean. Thus, we are pulled into the crushing world of a Detroit auto-parts plant and its African-American employees.

David Sheward
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Piano Men
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

Take a pair of crowd-pleasing musicians and two baby-grand pianos, place them inside the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret, and let them loose with a cavalcade of hit tunes. That’s the formula for Piano Men. This latest creation, by artistic director Mark Clements, strikes all the right notes as these performers let loose with a playlist of greatest hits from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Kimberly Akimbo
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

Kimberly Akimbo the newly penned musical with book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, Shrek the Musical) and music by Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Caroline, or Change) is the most loving, loveliest, and poignant theatrical experience of the year.

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
January 2022
Belleville
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

Never before in viewing FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s performances have I seen so many talented people working hard to deliver a drama as inconsequential as Amy Herzog’s Belleville. It premiered in 2013 in what the program describes as a specific time of “new naturalism” that apparently is supposed to have various tragic and thrilling powers. Tragic, maybe. Thrilling, uh-uh.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
January 2022

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