Little Shop Of Horrors
Theater At The Center

 Based on Roger Corman's horror film of the 1950s, Little Shop of Horrors is a humorous and bright musical comedy send-up of the genre and the Fifties in general. The horror of this little skid row flower shop is a bloodthirsty, flesh-eating plant, for whom the Beverly Hills diet means Shelley Winters for breakfast and Raymond Burr for dinner. A wimpy plant shop employee, Seymour (Steve Dunne) is the unwitting keeper of the bloodthirsty plant, and a brassy, tacky, but warmhearted employee named Audrey, played by Heidi Kettenring, is the girl of Seymour's dreams.

Richard Allen Eisenhardt
Date Reviewed:
June 1999
Little Shop Of Horrors
Actors Theater of Louisville

 Who has customers when you run a flower shop on Skid Row? the owner, Mr. Mushnik (Fred Major), laments to his two lame-brain employees, Seymour (Steve Routman) and Audrey (Audrey Klinger), as the day ends without a single person coming by. But when Seymour suddenly produces from the back room and places in the front window a weird-looking plant he has been nurturing, the shop begins drawing customers galore along with swarms of interviewers who make Seymour famous in every media outlet.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
February 2001
Little Shop Of Horrors
Cabot Theater - Broadway Theater Center

 Few shows rate the term "perfection." However, cult musical fans will want to rush to the box office to buy what few tickets remain for the Skylight Opera Theater's sparkling production of Little Shop of Horrors. Interestingly, the Milwaukee production arrives on the eve of its Broadway revival, scheduled to open October 2. For those unwilling to hop a plane to New York, however, there's plenty to enjoy right here at home.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2003
Little Shop Of Horrors
Marcus Center For The Performing Arts

 The Marcus Center for the Performing Arts closes its 2004-05 Broadway season with the peppy Little Shop of Horrors. This is the touring version of the Broadway show, directed by the talented Jerry Zaks. The show benefits from its newfound Broadway polish, with a cast that showcases top voices and excellent performances. Kathleen Marshall's choreography is another new treat. Much of it is lavished on the top-notch trio of Skid Row chorines. They have been given more prominence in this version; indeed, they appear in almost every scene.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
Little Women
Broadway Theater Center - Cabot Theater

 Just as the novel, "Little Women," is more than a Victorian tale about four sisters, so is the new opera, Little Women, more than a story set to verse. It is just as much a musical as it is an opera -- except the dialogue is briefer and the songs are longer.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2005
Little Women
Marcus Center For The Performing Arts

 It is doubtful that Little Women: The Musical will become a theatergoer's all-time favorite show, in the way some feel about South Pacific or even the macabre Sweeney Todd. There is much to like about Little Women, but unfortunately, the deficits outweigh the show's few but undeniable benefits.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
July 2006
Lively Lad, The
Actors Theater of Louisville

The Lively Lad, the fourth of the six full-length plays in this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is sheer unadulterated bliss. Imagine Oscar Wilde teamed up with Joe Orton to create an outrageously droll plot for which Gilbert and Sullivan supply epigrammatic bursts of song. With The Lively Lad, the mission has been accomplished with dash, vigor, style and flair, and it's all been done (except for the music by Michael Silversher) by one man: the amazing Quincy Long.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Living With Klaus
Bunbury Theater

 Juergen K. Tossmann, Bunbury Theater's producing/artistic director, has become quite the accomplished playwright in recent years with his string of blue-collar-milieu comedy/dramas that include Salvage Yard, Garage Sale, Salvage Yard Revisited and Uncle Smiley's Comin' Home. With his latest effort, another world-premiere comedy, the cleverly written and delightfully performed Living With Klaus, he has taken a giant step forward in subject matter and character development.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
September 2003
Glass of Wine, A
Brick Theater

 Daniel Fortano is an enchanting, charming clown with great physical flexibility and perfected circus skills. In A Glass of Wine, his struggles to drink a glass of wine cause him to juggle, do hat tricks, balance on a ladder, and more, all with gymnastic plasticity and great charm.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Nosdrahcir Sisters, The
Brick Theater

 The Nosdrahcir Sisters are Kimberly and Sara Richardson, who give us terrific, innovative, totally engaging comedic sketches with a bevy of fully-realized characters. Both of these women have great physical elasticity, and their various characters are very clearly defined. Lots of fun.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
September 2008
Kiss Me, Kate
Martin Beck Theater

 With the end-of-the-year closing of this Tony-winning revival just announced, a look in on the Cole Porter classic showed the tuner to be in generally fine shape. As Lili, Carolee Carmello, heretofore not known for goofy turns, has hilarious facial expressions to go with her lovely, trilling vibrato.

David Lefkowitz
Date Reviewed:
September 2001
Frost/Nixon
Geva Theater - Mainstage

 "I am not a crook," Richard Nixon famously declared, and he lied. But he was not a fool. In this production of Frost/Nixon, a play originally made for England's Donmar Warehouse in London, Keith Jochim achieves a brilliantly layered portrait of Nixon, a man far more complicated than most accounts even suggest.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Still the River Runs
Nova Southeastern University - Black Box Theater

 Things seem just a little off before the lights go down in Davie for the start of Still the River Runs. The dark-mud colored backdrop seems to be more Old-West desert than Central Florida ranchland-turning-suburbia, and the recorded-live-with-audience gospel music seems too loud for the tiny Black Box Theater at Nova Southeastern University. But then The Promethean Theater production of the Barton Bishop play begins, and under the direction of Margaret M.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
November
GableStage at Biltmore Hotel

 In the Oval Office of David Mamet's November, it's a few days before an election that seems likely to defeat the widely unpopular incumbent. There's no cash to buy television time, and the party committee isn't helping. But perhaps worse for this prez is that he's likely to leave office without enough money to set up a proper presidential library -- and his wife has designs on a White House sofa.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
October 2008
Glory Box
P.S. 122

Tim Miller states in the first five minutes that a "glory box" isn't what you're thinking. It's not just the object which sets up the riveting story Miller relays to us, but the show itself, more a cause for the celebration of gay voices in the theater since maybe Tony Kushner's Angels In America.

A devastating monologue which intercuts Miller's gay awakenings as a youngster with his more current, urgent tale of trying to get his Australian lover Alistair safely into America as a citizen so they may continue their life together.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
December 1999
Golda's Balcony
Manhattan Ensemble Theater

 Theater lovers are in luck. One of New York's great actresses is on stage again. Tovah Feldshuh plays Golda Meir in Golda's Balcony, a powerful, moving tour-de-force performance of the life of the leader of Israel, a woman both strong and vulnerable, beginning as a young Zionist and leading up to the fateful critical events when she is Premier in a time of war.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2003
Ghosts
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

 Beautifully directed by Diana Leblanc with a compelling sense of foreboding atmosphere and absolute realism, and translated by J. Basil Cowlishaw to give the most specific and unmistakable references to Ibsen's theme of venereal disease (without ever mentioning its name), this is perhaps the most effective and affecting production of Ghosts I've seen. Too often the play seems both stuffy and dated, but here it is clearly neither.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
September 2006
Giorni felici
Galleria Toledo

 Naples was the latest stop for experimental theater Krypton's production of Samuel Beckett's 1961 Happy Days. The offering was part of the successful joint subscription Mercadante 2, uniting the most interesting productions here at Galleria Toledo with others at Teatro Nuovo and the Mercadante in an effort to expand the audience for serious theater in Naples. As is customary, Carlo Frutteto's classic Italian translation, made directly from Beckett's original French, was used.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
December 1996
Giulio Cesare

 See review(s) in Criticopia - Regional (U.S. tour)

Glass Menagerie, The
Stratford Festival - Avon Theatre

 If you have never seen a good production of Tennessee Williams' signature play, this workmanlike version is an excellent introduction: nicely mounted, sensibly directed, and expertly played. Except, however, for some few inspired moments in Steven Sutcliffe's sensitive and subtly suggestive portrayal of Tom, Williams' semi-autobiographical narrator, this Glass Menagerie is not a particularly memorable or extraordinary version of this perhaps overly familiar American masterwork.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Golden Boy
Greenwich Theatre

 In Clifford Odets' original 1937 play, Golden Boy, the protagonist was an Italian American torn between playing the violin and boxing. When turning the work into a musical (1964), Odets threw out the violin plot and changed the title character into a black Harlemite, Joe Wellington, just out to make a fast buck. When Odets died during the writing, his friend William Gibson took up the pen and finished the adaptation. London has not seen the musical since 1968, so a new production is welcome.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 2003
Guys and Dolls

 If there is a musical comedy masterpiece, it is Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, and Jo Swerling's Guys and Dolls. Swerling and Burrows' book adapts Damon Runyon's stories of funny, flavorful lowlifes with wit and zest.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Happy Days
Galleria Toledo

(see Criticopia International review(s) under "Giorni felici")

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
December 1996
He That Has The Mirror
Sangelage Theater

 Among the cultural events commemorating Muslim leader Imam Ali this year was a brief theater festival in late October and early November 2000 of ten new works. The Fatemeh Zahra Company, an enterprising young women's theater group from Tehran's neighbor city Karaj, offered an allegorical portrait of the Shia religious figure. Narges Zareii cleverly incorporated images from Ali's writings into a piece about an acting troupe searching for a good subject for women.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
November 2000
Happy Days
Nikolai Masalitinov Dramatic Theater

The Plovdiv Theater Festival "Scena na Krystopyt," running September 12-23, 2002, includes this premiere from the Adriana Budevska Theater in Burgas on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. While most performances are inside the Nikolai Masalitinov Dramatic Theater, this one of Happy Days is outdoors in the entrance courtyard.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
September 2002
Tuna Christmas, A
Actors Theater of Louisville

 For the farewell run of A Tuna Christmas winding up after its 13 years as a popular seasonal offering, Actors Theater of Louisville has mounted the handsomest production I've ever seen of this wildly funny two-hander.

Paul Owen's adaptable set appropriately mirrors an old-fashioned radio for the opening scene at the 225-watt station OKKK, where down home announcers Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie (Warren Kelley and Brad DePlanche, who play all 22 characters populating Tuna, the third-smallest town in Texas) are hyping coming Christmas activities.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
November 2008
Hamlet
New Ambassadors Theatre

 Straight from page to stage comes this authentic production with a young, dark, handsome Hamlet, vigorously interpreted by Ed Stoppard. A fine, sometimes curtained black box, with a centered trap, lets lighting or fog -- but mostly Shakespeare's poetry -- set the action. Traditional costumes set time and the wearers' social status. (Gertrude's fanciful red gown surely helps Anita Dobson act the scarlet woman.) Almost all the long speeches and soliloquies are played directly to the audience from downstage center, and they work! They are thoughts given breath or intimacies shared.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Hamlet on Trial
Theatre les Dechargeurs

 see Criticopia review(s) under French title: "Le Process d'Hamlet"

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2002
Heiress, The
Royal George Theater

 This handsome revival of The Heiress is impeccably acted by a typically adept Shaw Festival cast, except that, as in their Arms and the Man, I'm disappointed with the female lead. The physical production is wonderfully realistic, yet richly suggestive. But, at least in the first act, I don't believe most of Catherine's emotions and even find Tara Rosling's behavior in the title role to be anachronistic and inappropriately lower class. Rosling looks remarkably like Cherry Jones in this role, but it would be unkind to compare the two performances.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Henry IV, Part I
Tom Patterson Theater

 Of the many Henry IV Part 1s I've seen (including four of the previous five at Stratford), I think the finest was the 1965 Stratford production directed by Stuart Burge. I remember the stunning young Canadian actors, all new to me, and now justly famed: Douglas Rain as Prince Hal, Douglas Campbell as Hotspur, Martha Henry as Lady Percy, and the late Tony van Bridge, still my favorite Falstaff. Desmond Heeley's great designs included a long trailing cape for the "wizard" Glendower.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Henry V
National Theater - Olivier

 For his first personally-directed production in his tenure as the National Theatre's new honcho, Nicholas Hytner chose that most famous of war plays, Henry V, which the institution had never mounted, probably in deference to the celebrated Oscar-winning 1944 film by Hytner's predecessor, Sir Laurence Olivier. This film, superb though it was, used less than a third of Shakespeare's text and turned the title character into a heroic paragon to boost British morale in World War II. Even Kenneth Branagh's grittier 1989 film sanitized the play.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 2003
Henry VIII
Festival Theatre Stage

 Finally, Shakespeare's Henry VIII, subtitled "All Is True," is not thought to be entirely written by Shakespeare and has a decidedly uneven script but is fairly accurate history, easily followed, and mostly believable. The excessive praise for the great age heralded by the newborn baby Elizabeth in the finale may sound like fawning flattery for Shakespeare's queen, but the play is thought to have been written a decade after Elizabeth's death. It does have much pageantry and scheming, so it requires a large, gifted cast and an elaborate production.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
High Society
Festival Theatre Stage

 I'd not seen this stage musical, though I'm very familiar with Philip Barry's sparkling play, The Philadelphia Story, that it's based on, and the dazzling movie of that play (which I think improved on Barry's script), and the delightful film musical for which Cole Porter wrote his last hit score. So I wondered why this stage musical, adapted from the movie musical, was never the big success that all its predecessors were. Now I know.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
His Girl Friday
National Theatre - Olivier

 In 1928, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur penned a classic comedy about journalism titled The Front Page (both authors were ex-journalists). Based on this script, Charles Lederer wrote a screenplay that was filmed in 1939 by Howard Hawks under the title "His Girl Friday," in which ace reporter Hildy Johnson was changed from a man to the ex-wife of editor Walter Burns. American playwright John Guare was persuaded to conflate the two (though the original play needed no rewrite), and has done so with considerable, if not total, success.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
August 2003
History Boys, The
National Theatre - Lyttelton

 Warning: If youre not British, don't expect to find this play as funny or like it as much as the Brits do. Past the references to Grammar School in the 1980s North (the setting), to the Education System, and to politics, there is, however, a clash of values that anyone can understand and find interesting. It occurs when Headmaster, keen as can be to get his grads into Oxford, hires bright, opportunistic Irwin to coach the boys for the entrance test.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2004
Hitchcock Blonde
Lyric Theatre

 Playwright Terry Johnson, who turns 48 this year, has chosen to direct his latest play himself, so the result is clearly what he envisioned. His production of Hitchcock Blonde has turned out to be disappointing and confusing. Three time frames are involved, separated by four decades.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
August 2003
Holy Mothers
New Ambassadors Theatre

 The late Austrian playwright Werner Schwab (1958-94) is known for writing social dramas with blunt, even shocking language. Holy Mothers, as Meredith Oakes titles her 1997 translation of Die Praesidentinnen, is no exception. Not only is it blasphemous, obscene and scatological, but it becomes increasingly cloacal as it proceeds on its grotesquely funny way. A hideous kitchen is the arena for three aging Catholic women.

Caldwell Titcomb
Date Reviewed:
July 1999
Honour
Wyndham's Theatre

 Chairs set row upon row, back and sides, unoccupied in shadows suggest the action of Honour is a trial. Still, famous writer George (Martin Jarvis, trying hard to be winning) never really makes anything but a selfish case for leaving his wife Honor for a younger woman. No matter how cunningly she (Natascha McElhone as Claudia, with claws) flirts when she comes to interview him, nor how beautiful and assertive she is. No way does his offer to give his wife half of most of their belongings appear generous.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
March 2006
Human Voice, The
Stratford Festival - Studio Theater

 This one-act evening begins with a jewel of a bonus: Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice. I was impressed to see Lally Cadeau in a virtual walk-on playing the Bastard's mother in the all-star King John, but Cocteau's mini-masterpiece monologue is more worthy of that exquisite actress. It's just a woman posing, pretending, pleading, and promising on the telephone with the lover who has broken up with her. She has no melodramatic action or excessive expression. She doesn't leave her bedroom. She just talks on the phone.

Herbert Simpson
Date Reviewed:
August 2004
Wilder! Wilder! Wilder!
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Cook Theater

 Onto a stage filled with boxes at various levels, parts of a painted backdrop against a backstage wall and bits of props scattered about, a stage manger removes the ghost light. Reality enters in the form of actors with suitcases. These and the relatively bare stage are supposed to suggest movements to various places during a life cycle of members of a family. The actors appear in "everyday" clothes from 1930 through 1960s America, time and place of five of Thornton Wilder's short plays. They are all downers, at least as played in this production of Wilder! Wilder!

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
November 2008

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