Mauritius
Cygnet Theater - Rolando Stage

 Fanatical philatelist is freaky! Prolific playwright, screenwriter, TV writer, fiction writer, novelist Theresa Rebeck has crafted a delightfully twisting tale of cons, deceit, and lies in Mauritius. Premiering in San Diego at Cygnet Theatre's Rolando Stage under director Francis Gercke's creative hand, the play challenges the audience to try to find the truth.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Veronica's Room
Patio Playhouse

 Susan (Alisha Perry), a young college student, and Larry (Chaz Close), a lawyer she has just met, are dining at a fashionable restaurant. A seemingly nice older couple invites them to their home. Thus ends the back story as the older Irish couple enters Veronica's Room.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Tale of Peter Rabbit, The
Dallas Children's Theater

 Upon entering the theater, the first thing that commands our attention is the fabulous set designed by Randel Wright. Including a superb upstage diorama, the entire stage for Kathy Burks Theater of Puppetry Arts' production of Peter Rabbit is filled with a replica of Mr. McGregor's garden.

Rita Faye Smith
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Pay Attention
Santa Monica Playhouse - The Other Space

 Frank South's solo show, Pay Attention (reviewed on preview night), is still very much a work in progress. As developed by Margaret South (Frank's wife) and Mark Travis, the piece now runs an uninterrupted and somewhat grueling two hours. No doubt it can and will be whittled down, but even in its overly long, often-repetitive state it is powerful and moving enough to make it worth seeing.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Necessary Targets
Fort Lauderdale Children's Theater - The Studio

 Playwright Eve Ensler, known for The Vagina Monologues went to Bosnia in 1995 to interview women caught up in the violent unraveling of the Balkans, specifically the Muslim refugees escaping Serb atrocities. Necessary Targets is the result. The South Florida-based Women's Theater Project gave it its southeastern U.S. premiere in August 2004 in a production so well received that it has been produced again by the same director and cast in a bigger venue. It hasn't lost a thing to time and space.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Sister Cities
Cooper City Theater

 In Sister Cities, three grown sisters scattered across the nation arrive at the home of their mother upon receiving word, from a fourth, of her death the day before. More surprising to them than her demise – mom had been sick a long time -- is that her lifeless body still is in the bathtub upstairs.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
March 2007
Mauritius
New Theater

 The program of Mauritius, the Theresa Rebeck Broadway play getting its southeastern debut at New Theater in Coral Gables, promises "a sinister comedy about stamps." In the spirit of that alliteration, let it be known that the play has a serious side involving half-sisters (same mom. different fathers) and that the staging reflects the tale's split personality.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Lend Me a Tenor
OnStage Playhouse

 Aspiring singer/Cleveland Grand Opera Company functionary Max (Brian P. Evans) is having a bad day. World-famous visiting tenor, Tito Merelli (Dave Rivas), is late for a performance, and Max' boss and father of his girlfriend, Henry Sanders (Jeff Laurence) is chewing the scenery. To compound his problems, his lovely girlfriend, Maggie Saunders (Robin Boyington), is enamored with Tito. And this is only the beginning!

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Phoenician Women, The
Under Hotel Churchill

The Theater Inc. is not content with bringing their audiences usual contemporary fare. Currently they are performing Euripides' The Phoenician Women. The translation is by Marianne McDonald PhD, one the foremost Greek scholars a and translator of many Greek plays. In the fall, they will be premiering her original work, Fires in Heaven. Late summer they will be producing Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour. Quite a season!

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Little Dog Laughed, The
Diversionary Theater

 Agent Diane (Karson St. John) has a serious problem with her client, ready-for-prime-time actor Mitchell (Brian Mackey). It seems he has more than just eyes for the very attractive Alex (Bryan Bertone), a rent-boy. As Alex explains to his girlfriend, Ellen (Kelly Iversen), it's just a job. Obviously, Mitchell's Hollywood career is on the line, as is Diane's increased power as a star's agent.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Nine to Five

 See Criticopia review(s) listed under "9 to 5"

Three Postcards
Historic Asolo Theater

 After the show I asked a friend and staunch supporter of the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training if she had seen Three Postcards about 20 years ago as a regular also at Florida Studio Theater. Said she: "If I had, I wouldn't have come tonight." That earlier experience, however, had forewarned me: it was a disappointing show about three women done by anything-but-disappointing actresses. Though the musical supposedly has been revised since its debut in 1987, I detected but a few changes -- like updated references, for example, to the film "Thelma and Louise."

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
April 2009
Old Wicked Songs
North Coast Repertory Theater

 Seldom does a play actually move an audience; most are stories we soon forget about people who will be remembered for a day or two. That is far from the case with Jon Marans' Old Wicked Songs.

The action takes place over several months in 1986. Young American pianist Stephen Hoffman (Tom Zohar) has developed a very serious artistic block. He has traveled to Vienna and is under the tutelage of renowned Professor Josef Mashkan (Robert Grossman). Director David Ellenstein cast an ideal contrast.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Pull of Negative Gravity, The
American Heritage Center for the Arts

 It would be difficult to find a cast more committed to a play than the four people performing The Pull of Negative Gravity at Mosaic Theater, and it would probably be as difficult to find staging so ably in support of a work. So it's disheartening that the play itself isn't more committed to its heartfelt, angry task of exploring the damage wrought on the body of a soldier wounded in Iraq in the present conflict and to his family's emotional equilibrium upon his return to Wales.

Julie Calsi
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Fences
Geva Theater - Mainstage

 I don't know why August Wilson specialist Stephen McKinley Henderson, who was announced to direct this production, didn't; but, though he might have achieved a slightly more elegant subtlety [like his authoritative acting in Wilson's plays], I doubt he would have significantly improved Geva Theater artistic director Mark Cuddy's work on this beautiful revival of Fences. It is a landmark achievement for Cuddy and for his theater.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Tonight at 8:30: Brief Encounters
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater

 Ontario's great Shaw Festival's opening week of five productions began disappointingly but fortunately finished with two memorably fine revivals of modern classics, both new to Shawfest: a rewarding matinee of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon For the Misbegotten and a delicious new staging that evening of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Moon for the Misbegotten, A
Shaw Festival - Court House Theater

 It's hard to imagine why the Broadway premiere of this searing, beautiful play was received with such indifference. Its first production in 1947 was a disaster for many reasons and withdrawn from a planned Broadway debut; but the apparently fine 1957 revival with the splendid cast of Wendy Hiller, Cyril Cusack and Franchot Tone left few O'Neill admirers convinced that this was one of his best plays, and it ran for only 68 performances. Not until the legendary 1973 Broadway revival directed by Jose Quintero and starring Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards Jr.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Nights of Noir
Attic Theater & Film Center

Somebody forgot to tell writer/director Kasey Wilson that satires of 40s private-eye movies aren't exactly hot ideas today, although it's possible that a comic sketch along those lines might have seemed briefly fresh and funny. Wilson, though, opted to make a full evening out of her parodies of films like "The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon." Big mistake.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Born Yesterday
Shaw Festival - Festival Theater

Rumor has it that Garson Kanin got gag-writing suggestions from George S. Kaufman for Born Yesterday. In any case, the comedy, Kanin's most successful, has become a recognized classic, fairly crackling with witticisms and endlessly timely in its political satire. Its only problem is the popularity of the 1950 film which preserves Judy Holliday's incomparable, award-winning performance as Billie Dawn: inevitably, actresses following her in the role get compared to Holliday as often as actors playing the King in The King and I are compared to Yul Brynner.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Sunday in the Park With George
Shaw Festival - Royal George Theatre

 
I am not one of this Pulitzer Prize-winning musical's many admirers. I like its ideas and was knocked out by the Act One curtain tableau (on Broadway) which reproduces George Seurat's famous painting, "A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte."

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
May 2009
Marvelous Party, A
Florida Studio Theater - Keating Mainstage

 Punctuating Noel Coward's witty songs, lyrics, aphorisms, chatter with both sonorous sophistication and often high pacing, A Marvelous Party nonetheless comes up short of the talent it celebrates.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Four Dogs and a Bone
New Village Arts Theater

 Two actresses, claws full extended. One sleazy film producer and a tyro playwright who just want to get a film completed... just another day in a not-to-far-from-reality satirical look Hollywood. Prolific playwright John Patrick Shanley (Sailor's Song, Doubt, Psychophathia Sexualis, and many more) has an intimate knowledge of Hollywood. His hilarious Four Dogs and a Bone, currently at New Village Arts in Carlsbad, severely slashes at stereotypical Hollywood characters.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Souvenir
Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts - Mertz Theater

 I laughed 'til I cried.

Souvenir prompts both reactions because, though its self-deceived coloratura heroine gives unbelievably bad vocal performances (except "in her head"), her pianist accompanies her to a relationship that's mind-changing and heartfelt.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Festival, The
Swedenborg Hall

 H. P. Lovecraft's The Festival is an experience. House lights dim, both the house and stage are bathed in black light when we hear Walter Ritter's deep voice echoing in Swedenborg Hall with, "I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me."

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Lonesome West, The
10th Avenue Theater

 As I climbed the stairs to my seat at the 10th Avenue Theater, I saw the audience and wanted to shout for joy; I was the oldest by a couple of generations. There were senior high school and university students. San Diego, there may be hope for theater after all.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Cygnet Theater

 Six years ago, Cygnet Theater opened its doors to the public for the first time. It is fitting that the first show, a glam-rock musical titled Hedwig and the Angry Inch should be the last show at Cygnet's Rolando stage. We had been to the space many times when it was called the Actor's Asylum. It was also the theater where I saw Fridays with Maureen, the work of another reviewer, Cuauhtémoc Quetzalcoatl Kish. Ah the memories of the plays presented in the space.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Importance of Being Earnest, The
Stratford Festival - Avon Theater

 Internationally acknowledged as a master of Comedy of Manners, both as actor and director, Brian Bedford unsurprisingly gives us a classic, landmark revival of Oscar Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. Bedford's directorial hand is evident in the elegance and wit of this exquisitely designed production, not least in his actors' perfect delivery of the dialogue, which – although familiar to most of us and easily the most clever use of language in English drama – here makes us attend to every speech and delight in it as if only now encountering it.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Butcher of Baraboo, The
Diversionary Theater

If at all possible never, never accept an invitation to visit Valerie (Linda Libby), the town butcher, or her daughter Midge (Wendy Waddell), the local pharmacist. Their kitchen's crowded countertop features a full knife block and an extremely menacing meat cleaver. Valerie seems to fondle the cleaver with way too much tender loving care. Note, too, that there may or may not have been several murders, suicides, or runaways in recent history.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
New Perspective Festival
Swedenborg Hall

 The New Perspective Festival returns with 24 new short plays by 17 San Diego Playwrights performed by about 60 actors under 21 directors. The principals behind the festival are Festival Director Kelly Lapczynski, Tech Director Marie Miller, Company Stage Manager Lizzie Silverman, and Publicity Coordinator Sally S. Stockton. My regret is that because of scheduling conflicts, I'll only see one night of eight plays, sadly missing sixteen others.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Over the Tavern
North Coast Repertory Theater

 I laughed so hard tears rolled down my cheeks, and that was just the first ten minutes of North Coast Rep's San Diego premiere of Tom Dudzick's Over the Tavern.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Macbeth
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

 Oddly enough, the only production Des McAnuff had directed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival before becoming its artistic director in 2008 was a not-well-received Macbeth in 1983.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Three Sisters
stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater

 It's difficult to stage Chekhov. His plays are exquisitely detailed and rich in poetic realism so that what he called comedy can be played [and famously has been played] as tragedy, and his subtly developed characters are beloved challenges for actors, who are seldom wholly successful playing them. Chekhov is regularly prescribed in culturally elevating, if not curative, doses, but even a great play this comic, tragic and beautiful is more often a leaden, and sometimes soporific, theatergoing experience than a triumphant one.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Hair

 It would be impossible for any recording to fully capture the thrill of experiencing the revival of the seminal Gerome Ragni-James Rado-Galt MacDermot rock musical, Hair at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, but Ghostlight Records' cast album comes very close. This is one of those cases in which it might have been interesting to record the show live in performance, but of course, that method entails tremendous challenges.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
West Side Story

 
The cast album for West Side Story is emblematic of what's wrong with the current revival of this musical theater masterpiece. It starts off on a bad note with a sluggish, slack reading of the prologue by music director/conductor Patrick Vaccariello -- but not as sluggish and slack as "The Rumble" that ends Act I. There are plenty of other blunders throughout, such as the ludicrous "soprano sing-off" in "I Feel Pretty," one of the songs that have unwisely been translated into Spanish for this production.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Rock of Ages

 When the London cast recording of Mamma Mia! was released, I predicted that it probably wouldn't sell all that well. After all, I thought, even if multitudes of people loved the show, why would they want an album packed with ABBA covers that were crafted to sound as close to the originals as possible when they could buy the ABBA Gold collection and have the real thing instead?

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Next to Normal

The sad word on that street is that 2009 Tony Award winner Alice Ripley has been having trouble getting through eight a week of Next to Normal at the Booth Theater, her voice apparently having been compromised by her no-holds-barred performance and, in my analysis, by flawed technique. (Ripley sang consistently flat during the performance I attended, and she yielded the role of bipolar wife and mom Diana to her understudy for the show's first performance after the Tonys.)

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Allegro

 This is something of a miracle: A complete, two-disc, state-of-the-art, all-star studio recording of a lesser-known show by the greatest musical theater writing team of the 20th century, a show that was previously (mis)represented only by the severely truncated, monophonic original Broadway cast album.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
Les Miserables

 The recent, belated release of a CD of highlights from the original London cast album of Les Misérables gives me an excuse to rant about something I noticed a while ago: Cameron Mackintosh, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and other movers and shapers behind Brit musicals and cast albums apparently have so little respect for performers that they sometimes exclude their names from CD covers.

Michael Portantiere
Date Reviewed:
July 2009
West Side Story
Stratford Festival - Festival Theater

 After the tumultuous response at the end of the opening performance of this production, I was thinking fussily of my reservations about the chorus and orchestra sounding less impressive than in the 1999 West Side Story under the previous musical director and this Tony's unfortunate tendency to sing like an American Idol contestant and other small gripes. Then I saw the granddaughter of a friend, who is a Canadian theater critic, and she brought me back to my senses.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009
Ever Yours, Oscar
Tom Patterson Theater

 Unsurprisingly, Oscar Wilde was a great letter writer, and this selection from his earliest to his final letters presents an impressive biography of an extraordinary person and a gigantic talent. It is arranged to expose the private as well as the famous public Oscar Wilde and develops from his beyond-precocious early ideas and wit through his great fame and celebrity to his chastened, unhappy, but movingly humane final thoughts during and after his brutal imprisonment.

Herbert M. Simpson
Date Reviewed:
June 2009

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